Taking the Nightshift
Attending the 20th Berlin Porn Film Festival and performing in Los Angeles.
The last couple of months have been an intense period of working on my PhD dissertation (which, incidentally, is not about pornography). Progress has been slow and there have been many distractions, but the writing is crawling along and I hope to file by May 2026. To give myself the time and focus I need, I had to put content creation and my creative practice on hold, including the documentary project I have been developing about Asian adult content creators. This is also the reason why I have not been posting here as often.
Even with that pause, the past couple of weeks brought several meaningful updates. A short documentary video I made with Damian Dragon in January 2025, featuring an interview with Thai A.S.F.R. practitioner Vudhi K., was selected for the Berlin Porn Film Festival in October. I decided to make the trip and attended all three screenings of the film, where I spoke with the audience and answered questions. Seeing the film with an audience on the silver screen, with a proper sound system, was an unexpectedly moving experience. It has been a long time since I stepped away from filmmaking, and although this marks only a return to that practice on a small scale, it stirred a cascade of memories and associations from a previous life.
Taking a break from dissertation work made it difficult to return to the rhythm of writing afterward, but I appreciated the brief respite. It gave me time to reconnect with artists and performer friends in Berlin. Although I was there for less than a week in the middle of the semester, I filled the days with museum visits and as many festival screenings as I could manage.
The Global Fascisms exhibition at the House of World Cultures was at the top of my list. Several of the artists shown there also had films in the festival, including Vietnamese American professor and video artist Nguyen Tân Hoàng and Taiwanese artist Shu Lea Cheang. The exhibition was thoughtfully curated, but the sheer number of works, combined with jet lag, meant that there was only so much I could absorb before reaching saturation. Still, a few pieces stayed with me. Hou Chun-Ming’s BDSM and kink inflected works were striking, and Yoonsuk Jung’s Tomorrow (2020), which documents workers at a sex doll and mannequin factory, was evocative. There is something moving about watching manual labor and human hands tending to silicone skin, offering care and touch to an object manufactured for desire.
I also visited the 7th Berliner Herbstsalon - Re:Imagine: The Red House, a sprawling and ambitious exhibition at the Maxim Gorki Theatre. It may seem unusual for a theater company to stage an art exhibition, but they transformed parts of the building into video installations and galleries, including a small screening room. The burrow-like structure was disorienting in a way that made the experience more immersive. The works were politically charged, aligned with the ethos of the theater company and its namesake. Highlights included Turkish political detainee, journalist, and artist Can Dündar’s Museum of Small Things and his recreation of a solitary confinement cell from the Silveri prison complex, complete with a VR walkthrough. Hiwa K’s conceptually rigorous video works were also compelling.
At the Deutsche Bank space Palais Populaire, Singaporean queer artist Charmaine Poh, who received the Deutsche Bank “Artist of the Year” 2025, was presenting a solo exhibition on intergenerational sisterhood. During the visit, I also caught a performance by another Singaporean artist, Jee Chan, who carried out a frenetic calligraphic transcription of a conversation with his grandmother. It was great to see Singaporean contemporary art and performance presented in Berlin.
The heart of the trip was the film festival itself. This was my first time attending, even though it was the second film of mine to be selected. My first screening at the Berlin Porn Film Festival was in 2011, when I submitted my MFA graduation essay film Chancre. It was the only festival that accepted the film. I did not travel to Berlin at the time, since I was fresh out of graduate school and could not afford the trip. Returning to the festival almost sixteen years later felt significant and timely, the festival has grown over the years, and my work has also changed.
The festival is one of the longest running film festivals dedicated to pornography and erotic cinema. This year was its twentieth edition, which included several programs that revisited its history. I attended some of the “best of the competition short winners” screenings, which highlighted innovative and critically regarded erotic films from the past decades. There were several from this screening that left a deep impression, including performance artist Michael Portnoy’s Progressive Touch (2020), a weird and stylized movement piece. Matt Lambert’s Flower (2017), a film under Helix Studios and featuring some of their iconic talents including Joey Mills and Sean Ford, is another nostalgia-tinged, sun-soaked trip down memory lane to the golden-era of gay pornography.
It was quite a unique experience to sit in a cinema for hours with other viewers, watching erotic film after erotic film. Beyond the best of competition shorts, several other works stood out. The competition short winner, Cumrags, references the chiaroscuro of oil paintings and was composed entirely of still shots. It reminded me of a blend of the slow cinema associated with early 2000s Asian arthouse directors such as Tsai Ming Liang or Hou Hsiao Hsien, combined with the dramatic colored lighting of Fassbinder’s Querelle.
Another highlight was Breakfast Time by New York-based artist and kinkster Peter Cage. The film was formally rigorous and explored submission, subspace, power, and control with intelligence and restraint. Breakfast Time won the best fetish short category. My film, A.S.F.R., received a special mention in the same category. I appreciated the modest acknowledgement by the festival of our efforts. The opening feature, Fucktoys by Annapurna Sriram, who also appears in the film, is a bold experiment in what the director describes as a “neo-camp” genre rooted in John Waters and trash aesthetics. I read the film as an antithesis to Sean Baker’s Oscar-winning Anora. Fucktoys celebrates sex work and refuses to hinge its narrative on a male savior rescuing a damsel in distress.
If all of this was not enough for a six-day sojourn to Germany, I added a two-day visit to Hamburg over the weekend to spend time with the acclaimed rope rigger, photographer, and artist Male Shibari. We managed to fit in three intense sessions over two days. The experience deserves its own separate write up. I learned a great deal about myself, and Male Shibari pushed my limits in ways I had not experienced before, with my consent and pleasure of course. I am grateful to walk away with a clearer understanding of the contours of my kink.
These weeks of reconnecting with erotic film and rope practice did not end in Germany. Since my birthday falls on Veterans’ Day, which is also an academic holiday, I made a short trip to Los Angeles to participate in an event organized by fellow performance studies PhD colleagues Lena Chen, Evan Sakuma, and Aydin Quach. The event, titled The Nightshift: Queer Desire, Erotic Labor, & Radical Care After Dark, featured fourteen presenters in an evening of talks, film screenings, and performances that explored the entanglements of queer desire, erotic labor, and radical care. The presenters included academics, activists, and artists. The format resembled a PechaKucha or TED talk structure. Each of us had eight minutes to present documentation, a performance, or a lecture on our research.
Some of the highlights included Kendall Ota’s autoethnographic exploration of gay cruising practices in Korean spas, Summer Jade Leavitt’s intervention into queer libraries and archival institutions, Kayla Tange’s moving short film in the form of a letter to her birth mother as a Korean adoptee, and Lucas Hildebrand’s research into the history of gay bars in North America. Other presenters include: Tina Horn, Kim Ye, Keko Jackson, Stacy Macias, Jih-Fei Cheng, Alisa Yang, Farrah, Maria Silk, and Laura Dudu with CAO Collective.
The Nightshift is part of an ongoing series of events that Lena and Evan have organized under Bad Asians, a working group that challenges the myth of Asian Americans as a “model minority.” As they write in their statement, “rather than retreat into silence or strive for legibility as ‘American,’ this working group interrogates the ‘bad’ performances, aesthetics, and figures that have allowed for Asian American transgression, creativity, and survival.”
I participated in their inaugural event last year as a moderator for a conversation with artist Kim Ye, so it felt like a full circle moment to return for their concluding event of the year and perform alongside Kim as part of The Nightshift. Our initial conversation, which focused on Kim’s video art and performance lecture practice which intervenes critically into both the fetish of the commodity (in her Costco Shopper Analysis series) and the commodification of fetish practices (through fan sites infrastructure), has been transcribed and will be available soon in the online version of Theatre Journal’s upcoming issue on the transnational erotic.
Alongside Kim Ye, the other presenters who chose to perform ‘live’ for The Nightshift were Farrah, Laura Dudu and CAO Collective. The event took place at Tommy’s Place, a lounge and club style venue on the USC campus. The space, with its saturated colored lighting, couches, billiards and high tables, supported the vibes of the evening, which hovered somewhere between a burlesque show-and-tell and a lecture performance.
Farrah performed a chair and lap dance for an invisible john. Laura Dudu and CAO Collective presented a piece inspired by the practice of pounding glutinous rice with mallets, a gesture that read as both disciplinary and kinky within the context of the event. Kim and I both did durational performances, occupying spaces on the floor. Kim set up a temporary wellness and beauty salon with a massage table and lights, she cycled through various cosmetic procedures, including a micro-needling process during her spotlight section for the evening, magnified and projected ‘live’ onto the screens in the space.
I invited fellow adult content creator and kinkster Sir RJ to be my performance partner for the event. We knew each other through a mutual friend and had corresponded online, though we had never worked together before. We met the day before the performance to practice some ties and film a scene, which helped establish intimacy and rapport. Sir RJ brought valuable experience to the collaboration: he had performed as a rope bunny at bondage performances at Folsom Street Fair with other riggers, he also received circus training, so he knew what to expect in terms of duration and stamina.
When Lena and her team first approached me about doing a rope performance, I wanted to focus on aspects of rope bondage that I seldom witness in performance contexts: the sensuality and intimacy of untying, elements that might be less spectacular and take more time. Going into the performance, I also knew the space had no hard point for suspension work. Since I was not confident with suspension-based ropework and I have not tied with Sir RJ often, I planned to work exclusively with floor-based ties.
We began the durational performance at the top of the evening, once the house opened and guests started arriving. I worked through some chest harnesses as people filtered in. We took a brief pause while the mistress of ceremony, kink podcaster and writer Tina Horn, introduced the evening and read an excerpt about fisting from her book Why Are People Into That?: A Cultural Investigation of Kink.
As various presenters took the stage for their eight-minute spotlights, Sir RJ and I continued cycling through other ties. I worked through a butterfly chest harness, guided us through some weight-sharing movement exercises, tied an improvised asymmetrical hip harness, and bundled him into a fisherman’s harness. After blindfolding him, I teased him with the blunt edge of my safety shears, then cocooned him in red velour in preparation for our spotlight moment around 8:30 p.m.
Kendall’s presentation on the erotics of cruising in Korean spas was a perfect segue into our performance. Prior to the evening, I edited together two tracks from one of my favorite Indonesian-American electronic music duos, Filastine and Nova. The track also helped to ensure we kept within the allocated spotlight time. Our performance began with the mechanical beats of Miner before moving on to the gentle pelog melody of Murka, where Nova’s melodious vocals sing in Javanese of longing and wrath.
With Sir RJ standing and swathed in red cloth, I attached a long rope that extended across the space and began moving it slowly above the heads of the crowd. I wanted to extend the performance space beyond the puzzle mat squares we were tying on, to envelop and implicate the entire venue. As the taut, tensed rope drifted across the audience, it drew a line from me, through the crowd, to Sir RJ. Some audience members ducked to facilitate the rope’s movement through space, while others later spoke about their desire to touch and smell the rope as it floated through the crowd. On the projection screens and televisions in the space, a ‘live’ feed by the film crew documenting the event - Audrey Medrano and Jessica Fuquay - captured close-ups of the performance. I had specifically requested that the ‘live’ feed focus on the details and provide a counterpoint to the performance. Audrey and Jessica took this prompt and ran with it, capturing moments of rope dust floating in the air as rope pulled across rope, against cloth, and on skin. What they managed to capture was particularly brilliant as it all transpired under relatively tricky low-light conditions.
After this quiet exercise that calibrated attention, I pulled myself towards the red monolith and started undoing the hitches that held the bundle together. I spun Sir RJ around as I slowly unraveled the rope, then moved to unwrap the cloth, revealing his figure hidden beneath. We shared an embrace as Sir RJ emerged. Then I moved to undo the butterfly chest harness that held him, lingering as I tugged the rope loose against his hair and skin. The adrenaline of a performance distorts one’s perception of time. Some parts of the performance I remember distinctly, while others were a blur. I wanted a complete unraveling by the end of the song, and I almost made it, but there was still some rope on Sir RJ by the end. He responded with laughter and the spotlight moment concluded as the music track ended, with me hugging him from behind as we kissed. As attention returned to the lectern where the next presenter Keko Jackson spoke about their work, I continued to untie Sir RJ. The rest of the evening was tender aftercare, as we cuddled and listened to the rest of the presentations, recovering from the performance and rope session.
I flew back to campus the next morning on an early flight and was in the classroom teaching by 11 a.m. I took several days to reflect and recover from the exhilarating trip. I kept my PhD life relatively separate from my kink and erotic practice, even though the two lives have ended up somewhat intertwined over time. It was still an uncanny experience to be performing rope bondage at night and teaching merely a few hours later.
All in all, I consider it a birthday well spent. Together with the Berlin trip, these couple of weeks have been a reminder that it is impossible to step away from embodied practice, that it somehow finds its way back into your life even in spite of you attempting to leave it aside to focus on writing. Perhaps it was never about choosing between dissertation and practice, but about recognizing how they complement each other in a way that resists direct, logical, and immediate interpolation.
