“Untitled (Men I Have Ever Met)” is a one-on-one, audience participatory performance where a participant listens to me reading in an ASMR style my personal narratives about first encounters with men whom I have come to know through dating apps, mutual acquaintances, and social media. Composed of 90 episodes, the narratives describe how myself as a queer Asian man has built my identity through different types of relationships with others (e.g. dating, one-night stands, and socializing) in a foreign country. By sharing this archive of secretive stories with participants, I aim to create an intimate moment where we can speculate the visibility of queer Asians, feel the romance found in the act of reminiscing, rethink social functions of the erotic, and ask the meaning of interpersonal relationship building in the narrative (the main character and various men) and the performance (a performer and anonymous participants).

Inspired by Felix Gonzalez Torres’s minimal installation that represents human relationship and lifespan by lightbulbs, I installed two lightbulb cords on the ceiling in between two chairs, each for me and the participating audience. When the participant took a seat, they indicated with their fingers which of the 90 episodes they would like to hear. While I was holding one lightbulb, the participant held the other lightbulb with a pair of gloves during the reading. The lightbulbs illuminated a dark space and provided the participant warmth while I was delivering the narrative to them through a pair of headphones. The reading took about 8 minutes, after which the participant and I juxtaposed our lightbulbs to create an angle representing the episode number. For instance, if the participant chose Episode 90, we formed the right angle. Then we let the lightbulbs swing on the count of three. The bulbs then hit each other to be exploded, went out, or missed each other, swinging continuously. Motivated by Korean performance artist Hee Ran Lee’s 50 Bulbs, I creatively adopted the bulb-throwing gesture to indicate a wide range of intensities of human relationships found in the text itself and the performance.