Artist Interview
Fei Gao “Fei the Beast”
Barbara Journal
Edition .03 - DIGITAL
2024
Fei Gao is an emerging artist based in Dharug Country/Western Sydney. He was among eleven artists awarded a residency this year with the Queer Development Program (QDP), an initiative by Performance Space and PACT Centre for Emerging Artists in Eora/Sydney. The program has become an incubator for some of Australia’s most compelling queer talent, connecting artists with an intergenerational community of queer makers and mentors, culminating in an annual QDP Showcase. This year’s cohort brought forth an array of works that, in their variety and ambition, are a testament to the program’s impact.
Amidst a roster of exceptional talent, Fei’s presentation stood out as the clear showstopper. His performance piece, titled The Red Bean, was a tender and elegantly choreographed drag rendition of Faye Wong’s love ballad of the same name. Dressed head to toe in a dazzling custom-made costume, like an extravagant video game avatar, Fei embodied the humble red bean, recasting it as an elaborate contemporary deity – and in doing so, elevated himself to the same status. At the end of his performance, the room was on its feet, many of the audience members visibly moved. In his own words, “the red bean symbolises the sweat and tears one sheds for a lover – something sweet that can also become bitter if not cooked right”.
The Red Bean builds upon Fei’s sustained engagement with intimate histories of migration, queerness, and love, which he gives life to through a digital vocabulary; leveraging digital technology’s dual capacity as both medium and metaphor for networked transformation. Fei draws particular inspiration from video games – their immersive world-building, rich character design, and potential for interactivity. While video games are often dismissed as trivial or mere escapism, Fei’s work challenges these notions, presenting them as powerful tools for self-reflection which offer modern-day allegories of enduring collective concerns and experiences.
For Fei, video games are fundamental to his generation's development, a virtual space where radical hybridity, playfulness, and problem-solving can flourish – an attitude that is increasingly shaping the ‘real world’. By bringing the virtual into the physical space of the gallery and stage, Fei guides us toward the next frontier of creative expression. Through experimentation and innovation, he transmutes personal pain and heartbreak into contemporary memoir, offering us an intimate view into his journey of healing, connection and renewal.
Fei Gao
The Red Bean
2024
© Joseph Mayers