Mooni Perry

Binlang Xishi: chapter 2,

2021-2022

Single-channel video, 16min 22sec

Mooni Perry

Mapping with Mooni Perry: Genre Yuri or GL (Girls' Love), 2023

2D Graphic

Mooni Perry's works, Binlang Xishi: Chapter 2 (2021-2022) and the newly commissioned research-based video piece, Mapping with Mooni Perry: Genre Yuri or GL (Girls' Love)(2023), are powerful explorations into the themes of "double-fallen beings" and liberation from established hierarchies. Binlang Xishi: Chapter 2 centers on the interview and stories of two groups of workers in the binlang industry in Taiwan: the farmers who cultivate the product and the service workers, known as Binlang Xishi or Betel Nut Beauties, who sell betel nuts while wearing revealing attire. Through an interview with the owners of a binlang shop and a fictional characterization of White Snake and Green Snake, the work raises questions about the negative stigma surrounding the binlang industry. In Mapping with Mooni Perry: Genre Yuri or GL (Girls' Love), the artist extends the relationship between White Snake and Green Snake introduced in the previous work to explore the desires and impulses present in Asian girls' culture, particularly in the realm of Girls' Love (GL). The research suggests that GL serves as a means to escape reality, empower themselves, and envision a new life through queer female characters. The research also mentions that the act of actively engaging with GL works creates a sense of community among girls and allows them to experience subversive pleasure and unprecedented agency, as well as it also serves as a platform for queer women to critique mainstream culture and reinterpret it from a new perspective of female homosexuality. This prompts a reassessment of the composition of these elements in the repeated performance and arrangement within and outside the semantic norms and relationships, thus enabling us to scrutinize existing power dynamics and imagine establishing a new semantic structure.