AN ART PROJECT BY HOO FAN CHON
TEXT BY WILLIAM THAM
The photograph displayed on this issue’s cover, as well as the ones featured in these pages, were found by artist Hoo Fan Chon in an antique shop in George Town, in Malaysia. In doing research, he traced back the photos’ owner, Ava, and got to know about her through multiple meetings with her lifetime friend, Anita. The following text is written by William Tham and was originally published in Portside Review in 2023. It describes the ways through which Fan Chon revived this memory through both Ava’s photos and Anita’s words and how their gender identity escapes definitions and demarcations.
At a glance, this photograph from 1957, the year of Malaysia’s independence, tells a story of everyday frivolity. A group of women down by the beach, taking a day away from town, on the fringes of what the East India Company once governed as “India.” But a closer look points out a different story: in their revelry, its subjects defy the gendered classification schemes of the census. This photograph is one of many inherited by the artist Hoo Fan Chon, who sifts and sorts through them, trying to tease out a story. Among these photos, one face was particularly prominent, and after five years he learned her name: Ava Leong, who named herself for Ava Gardner. In a recent film, I Enjoy Being a Girl (2022), he tells his story this way.
“I chanced upon a collection of studio portraits of a young boy and a woman in an antique shop in George Town, Penang. I eventually discovered that these photographs belonged to Ava Leong, a local female impersonator who passed away in 2018, and I became acquainted with Anita, Ava’s lifelong childhood friend.”