Whiteness. Solitude. A melancholic non-existence. The first time I came across A Little Bit Fat, I didn’t dwell on what kind of creature it actually was; I only felt myself pulled into a thick, almost saturating emotion. Its soft, inflatable contour suggests the elasticity of our space between. I stepped into a spiritual alter-place with no one presiding over it, where queerness had slipped loose from control and begun to grow on its own. Like a balloon.
Instead of a maker of installations or a creator of an anime figure and its imagery, I unbiddenly see Ruichao Jiang as a firsthand inhabitant of a theatrical experiment. A Little Bit Fat fractured out of Jiang’s teenage alter-ego, yet it outstrips any autobiographical looking-back or memory. These uneasiness, awkward receptions, and heaviness are always there, distancing from yet accompanying Jiang. They are present tense, ongoing entanglements. Ineffable feelings—so real that they almost crystallize into a body, and so unspoken they then float ghostly.
In the exhibition All About A Little Bit Fat at All Street Gallery, New York, curator Shuang Cai refrains from treating A Little Bit Fat as an art object to be explained and handled. Her affect-laden curatorial text functions as a fabricating gesture, opening a zone that drifts between documentary and fiction. In that zone, A Little Bit Fat appears to claim its own position, leaving Jiang and Cai in a subtly entangled relation shaped by the creature’s self-directed presence. Thus, both the artist and the curator find that their relationships with A Little Bit Fat amount to a witnessing—they are drawn by the “white” moments that resist being called “lived” but only quietly “seen.”
A Little Bit Fat is white. In this whiteness lies its most conflicted temperament. White could be the color of a bird’s feather, but A Little Bit Fat cannot fly; white could entail a haunted, eerie aura, but A Little Bit Fat is utterly endearing, or even “cute”, characterized by its signature cowlick, round eyes, and tiny, tripartite bird claws in contrast with its oversized body. White is blank, a null or non-presence. White is also blindingly bright, throwing back every stream of light most intensely. A Little Bit Fat is a gentle but daring balance of the confusing auras—a (not-)coping with Jiang’s non-human impulse.
It does not seem precise to imagine Jiang’s theatre plainly as a post-human fantasy. The portrait series of A Little Bit Fat actually looks quite “human-ish.” Set within frames of varying textures and dimensions, the portraits exist as intimate touches, each of their tactile sensations and even temperatures signaling a more-concrete-than-human happening. In digital illustrations layered over photos of street views, A Little Bit Fat becomes site-specific contemplations. As a candle, A Little Bit Fat burns and melts; as a ceramic vessel, it comes into a delicate incubator for vegetal lifes. All manual imprints in these objects are hints of Jiang’s co-existence with A Little Bit Fat, through which she gradually carves (and sometimes retreats to undo) a new kind of humanness out of “white.”
A Little Bit Fat is a little bit human, a little bit uncanny, a little bit like Jiang, and also a little bit not. Through this giant whiteness, Jiang’s bodily rebellion is held by a tender, persistent reception, rather than simply resolved. With this hope, we may endure as little more than “a little bit.”
Written By Weifan Mo
