HUIYIN ZHOU 徽音

My photo series focuses on the intimate lives of the Chinese queer feminist community in Durham, New York, Baltimore, and Irvine, CA. I guide my work with a queer feminist framework of intimacy, which I loosely define as a sense of connection and closeness beyond the heteronormative definition of sexual intimacy. At a time when connection is limited by geopolitical rivalries, manufactured borders, and a pandemic, feeling intimate with oneself and with others is a political act of reclaiming our own agency to still care and love in the ruins.

Different from what is usually considered social movement photography, which focuses on the “public”, the hypervisible, and explicitly political acts of protest, I reclaim the interior, affective lives of a transnational movement built on intentional relations and kinship. These are photos from communal cooking sessions, celebrations, and shared living spaces. Sometimes my friends look away and indulge in their own emotions, while other times they look at me straight into the camera with a playful smile or an open embrace. There are photos of folks making protest banners at a community gathering before PrideDurham, but there are also photos of my friend drawing a diary entry on the grave state of the world after a long day. There are photos taken in familiar places such as my bathroom that I share with a Chinese queer feminist friend; at the same time, there are photos of us cooking and transforming a temporary kitchen into our shared home. These are scenes of coming together and saying goodbye to each other, yearning for the day when we meet again. Through my photography process, I hope to uncover what Kevin Quashie calls the “sovereignty of the quiet” – the life sustaining rootwork of Chinese queer feminists who insist on seeing each other through our emotions, bodies, and vulnerabilities.

What registers the people in my photos as “queer” and “feminist” if these photos do not show their “difference”? I refuse to treat the affective and everyday experiences of living a queer feminist life as something readily accessible from photos, nor is it an “essence” I can “capture.” Instead, I treat photography as a conversation, a contact improv, and a mutual offering, whereby I get to know my friends just a bit more and invite them to witness our own history in the making. These are the intimate encounters of grief, joy, rest, and playfulness that are interwoven into the fabric of our community, and I decided to write and draw on my prints to ground these stories, quite literally, through my own lens.

Born and raised in the industrial hub of Dongguan, China, huiyin zhou 徽音 (they/she) is a transnational queer feminist organizer and community-based photographer, writer, translator and multimedia artist. They are based in Guangdong, NYC, and Durham, NC. They work with digital and analog photography, text, installation, and performance. Photographing with intimate and tender sensibilities, huiyin explores themes related to queer feminism, intimacy, memory, diaspora, and community and approaches photography with a relational, reciprocal praxis. huiyin is building a transnational Chinese queer feminist movement archive and a migrant worker poetry archive focusing on poets in Dongguan (an intergenerational collaboration with their family). Their photos have appeared in Sine Theta Magazine (issues 27, 26) and Margins zine.

huiyin’s 300-page prose collection 北极时间 was published by Shanghai Lit & Art Press in 2019. Their translations have been published by Scholar & Feminist Online (forthcoming), Massachusetts Review, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, and unCoVer Initiative. They also served as an editor for unCoVer Initiative (2020-21) and was editor-in-chief for Margins (2021-23). Other than photography and writing, huiyin co-founded and co-direct a queer feminist art and activist collective, Chinese Artists and Organizers (CAO) Collective离离草. They are a 2023-24 resident at BRIClab: Contemporary Art Disability Artistry as a co-leading artist for CAO Collective.