Qinrui Hua ‘18 MFA
Situated between fiction and observational documentation, Qinrui Hua’s Kick it out and Kill it invokes a hope that female desire and sexuality can have their own forms of expression. The protagonist’s notion of romance is queried and then eradicated through vignettes of anticipation, encounter, elation, pain, and disillusionment. As the subject of many of the images, Hua’s body appears simultaneously as unmediated self and disembodied protagonist. To bridge her dual roles as artist and subject, Hua literally punctures the picture plane through a series of plates showing gradations of color from orange to red made by the artist’s fingers pressing against the camera lens. This tactile insertion lets the narrative unfold as a fraught emotional experience that engages with discovering the unexpected self.