Junyi Min

Junyi Min a.k.a Jun (she/they) is a first-year MFA student studying visual arts. Originally interested in pain as a source of primal knowledge, she is learning to invite pleasure and other feelings into their performance works. She is currently interested in eroticism, sexuality, and intimacy and how they relate to the mundane, the absurd and the inexplicable.

I found an uprooted plant lying next to a fence of a construction site. Seemed like somebody had plucked it out, root and all, and threw it over the fence. I took it back into my studio and over the next weeks talked to the plant and tried to be by its side as it dies and shrivels up.

Raised by two subsistence farmers in rural China, my father was a very practical and quiet presence in the house. My fondest childhood memories with him were of eating hard-shelled food like walnuts, sunflower seeds, crab, and shrimp together without conversing much. The practiced act of eating these hard-shelled foods involved mimicry that subsequently displaced tender dialogue for us. In return to rituals of eating and being he shared with me, I wanted to share with him my ritual of performance that I have picked up over the last few years. In the video, I perform from a hotel I am quarantining in in San Diego while trying to recover from covid, and my father performs from our home in Singapore. 

work-in-progress / ruminations

cw: explicit sexual content

I tried to abstract the gestures of penile and vaginal masturbations into slits mimicking door-openings. Each vertical strip is a separate masturbation video I downloaded from Xvideos, cropped to focus on the act. I wanted to collage the videos to notice the differences between the two masturbations in order to rethink how one, especially one who is queer/trans, can re-invent self-pleasure with a perhaps not-here-yet genital or body.