Kathleen Lo: Variety of Beings

EVENT DESCRIPTION

As a heteronormative woman with a disability who has also been diagnosed with a mental illness, Kathleen Lo embarked on a photography project within the transgender community. She established connections with the transgender community through photography, learning about their knowledge and culture. She documented the life journeys of transgender individuals through both photography and interviews. Using photography as her methodology, Kathleen delved deeply into the challenges trans-gender individuals face with binary gendered restrooms, their personal bodily choices and gender expressions, their participation in identity politics, and the increasing issue of suicide among young people in marginalized communities under social stigma. Transgender gender dysphoria cannot be equal to mental illness, but the mental stress that transgender people has been shouldering definitely needs the society’s understanding and attention.

This series of photographs not only captures the cultural expressions of the trans-gender community and the rigid binary social system, but also intertwines with Kathleen’s personal spiritual experiences that contributed to her own mental illness diagnosis stigma. The foreign spaces she experienced alone may never be validated in this world; yet, who can definitively deny the countless possibilities among millions of living beings?

In this world, life is inherently diverse and varied. Inside and outside the lens, who can truly be deemed “normal”?

ABOUT THE ARTIST / ORGANISER