05/11 – 7 p.m. Inauguration: Yunping Li’s 在线 (huí jiā).

回 (hui) translates as “circle”, “time”, “return”, “turn around” and/or “answer”, and 家 (jiā) as “home” and/or “family”. Together they mean returning home, and this return means an autobiographical journey in my identity search processes.

It is a photographic project currently in progress that shows my gender transition process by delving into the concept of intimacy, bringing the private and the home into relation and at the same time understanding the body as a place to inhabit.

It begins in 2018 and develops between the Basque Country and Madrid, structuring itself in the different houses where I have lived. Thus, each chapter opens doors to delve into a new aspect of my identity, and gender expression, racialization, transsexuality and adoption are the pillars on which it is based.

Through self-portraiture, I capture the aesthetic exploration and physical changes my body undergoes over time. I explore the different possibilities of my image by multiplying it, breaking it, giving it shape…

In this way, the project challenges the boundaries of gender through the creation and development of the character who inhabits femininity through a transmasculine body, which dissolves to be made again, which goes to the place of origin.

These photographs that play with the codes of the family portrait perform the function of questioning consanguinity in the family, emphasizing the idea of ​​adoption as a choice.

In 2023, when I exhibited the project for the first time, I began to develop the line of research entitled “Performance self-portrait” consisting of making self-portraits in the exhibitions of the project itself. The challenge moves along the way, taking performativity a step further through its repetition. The act of exhibiting such an intimate process puts the private into the public; its meaning is deepened by activating a Site Specific intervention in the spaces where the exhibition takes place. This consists of immersing myself between the images, interacting with them and creating a final one, emphasizing the multiple layers of identity. Thus, the photographs are never the culmination of a process, but a starting point, a performative act in itself determined by repetition, insistence on the gesture and negotiation with the gaze of the other.

This hybridization of media reflects on the performativity of the photographic act and serves to integrate the dichotomies on which the project moves (man-woman, masculinity-femininity, Chinese-Basque, biological-adoptive child). In this self-portrait performance in which I intervene with the images, I also invite the public to participate, thus blurring the boundaries of authorship and between the public and the private. By inviting visitors to participate in this performance, they become part of the project; this tells us about the importance of the viewer in the work, it also discusses the influence of the external gaze on the construction of the self.

This concept refers to transit as a return to a place that is familiar to the body, that is circular and that is built in the same way as a home. Developed through photography, writing and performance, this portrays and documents my identity construction in relation to the body, physical space and family ties, as well as the relationship between them and the variations between narrative, representation, image, what is put in front of the camera and what happens outside. An essay about life that addresses themes such as the passage of time, change and the emotions that arise in the midst of it, self-awareness, desire and sexuality, uprooting, sadness, intimacy and loneliness.

Showing all the effects of the treatments, the aesthetic change and the evolution of someone who, at this time, is also progressing to
his own youth, 在线 (hui jiā) is an expansion through space and time. The project functions as a visual diary of everyday experiences surrounded by multiple transits of identity, where gender, racialization and adoption come together, where both author and work mutually make each other. You witness an intimate process of subjectivation – of becoming a subject – where corporeality operates as a rehearsal-performative space and mapping of change. The camera creates affective relationships and documents my life changes, a process that cuts through my experience as a transgender, adopted, and Chinese-born person.