Selfiction/ Xiaomei 自拍-小说/小美

Xiaomei and the Selfiction Series

From “I become different women” to “different women are all called Xiaomei,” this body of work examines how popular media constructs, narrates and consumes female identities.

“Selfiction” combines the ideas of the selfie, self-representation and fictional narrative. Through role-play, I work simultaneously as researcher, director and performer, re-enacting female archetypes drawn from Chinese mass media—particularly legal and crime programmes, talent shows, sports coverage and reality television. These women often have complex, controversial or tragic lives, yet their experiences are reorganised into emotionally charged stories designed to be watched, judged, sympathised with and morally interpreted.

In Flying Dance, Big Dream Show and Ping Pong Stream, I use my own body to enter these mediated lives. Flying Dance brings together a Chinese television crime story, the early internet novel The First Intimate Contact, footage from The Sims and my own performance to explore online intimacy, gender and the unstable boundary between documentary and fiction. Big Dream Show examines how television transforms personal hardship into inspirational entertainment, while Ping Pong Stream places an individual woman’s story within the wider narratives of competitive sport, national pride and political history. Across these works, real events, television archives, online fiction, video games and performed scenes are reconstructed into hybrid narratives that move between self-portraiture, documentary, re-enactment and fiction. The “self” is not presented as a stable identity, but becomes a method for entering other people’s stories and testing how media narratives are produced.

The Xiaomei series extends this practice into the age of short-video platforms and algorithmic storytelling. In Chinese online recaps of films and television dramas, female protagonists with entirely different identities and histories are frequently given the generic name “Xiaomei.” Xiaomei is therefore not a specific person, but a simplified media heroine: an interchangeable narrative position that can be repeatedly filled, circulated and replaced. Although the name sounds familiar and intimate, it erases individual differences and reduces complex lives to plots that can be quickly understood and consumed.

In Unbound Zine: Xiaomei Going Overseas, I appropriate this generic character once again, allowing Xiaomei to travel through East and Southeast Asian zine cultures, queer-feminist self-publishing, diasporic experience and cross-border migration. Here, she is no longer simply the heroine whose story is narrated by someone else. She gradually becomes a narrator, a carrier of stories and a figure connecting different communities.

Moving from the exaggerated “suffering women” of the television era to the generic Xiaomei of short-video culture, these works trace how women’s experiences are repeatedly rewritten by changing media systems. At the same time, through performance, fiction and self-publishing, the series explores how these appropriated identities might be reclaimed—and how women might regain the ability to tell their own stories.

Duration: 30 mins

Trailer:

Watch her. She is Xiaomei (Little Beauty). Call me Xiaomei. We are unbound zines. Small. Fragile. Fleeting. No ISBNs — that’s how they escape the systems that cage stories. In Asia, queer and women’s zines exist like nowhere else. Their formats dance between extremes — tiny pocket booklets that whisper secrets, oversized sheets that demand attention; bindings improvised with thread and hope, stitched by hand, or left brazenly unbound; materials experimental and alive. They inherit the lineage of woodblock prints and folk art, transforming traditional craft into radical publishing that burns bright.

This year, they surfaced. Breathing spaces into being! Then silence. No ISBNs, no voice. Censorship’s weight pressed them back into shadow. Overseas — Is this the only horizon left? What will we, those unbound zines, encounter drifting beyond the borders?

 

Crew:

Director: Oyester
Creative Producer: Burong Zeng Creative team members:

• Associate Director: Shuwen Tan
• Screenwriters: Oyester, Burong Zeng
• DOP: Holli Xue
• Art Direction: Oyester
• Post-Production Visual Effects & Editing: Holli Xue, Oyester
• Animation: Li Meng
• Original Music Composition & Sound Post-Production: Xuanni He
• Makeup & Styling: Human
• Costume Design: Oyester, Yushan, Xiaofu
• On-site Assistant Producers: Yushan, Xiaofu
• Drone: Yiqing Chen
• Translation: Burong Zeng
• Cast:
  • Funa Ye (multiple characters)
  • Five Xiaomei: Shuwen Tan, Human Hu, Anqi Fan, Sam Reynolds, Gene Lee
  • Group scenes: Funa Ye, Yufang Fu, Ling Zhang, Zhuoran Li, Man Yun Ku, Cheng Lee, Human, Anqi Fan, Sam Reynolds, Gene Lee, Ya Shu, Xiaofu Jiang, Yanchen Guo, Yushan Li, Jiaye Wang, Jiayu Wang, Tia Yooon, Burong Zeng, Martin Saps

Research Supporters:

Organizations & Archives: Asia Art Archive Grrrl Zine Library, Gwobean, Fuyin.INFO, Library Mothership, MondayOFF, The Pidgin Library, ZINE COOP

Space Support:  Asia Art Archive, Grrrl Zine Library, Gwobean, Hong Kong, KL Zine Etc., Kuala Lumpur, Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, ZINE YO! FEST, Hong Kong

Individuals:
Dr Hongwei Bao, Sam Yi Yao Chao, Lilin, Krystie Ng, Beatrix Pang, Sickgirl

Supported by Arts Council England National Lottery Project Grant