Screening & Q/A with IASPIS Artist in Residence Hoo Fan Chon
Welcome to the screening of Hoo Fan Chon’s film “I Enjoy Being A Girl”, followed by a Q&A with the artist.
Photo courtesy of the artist
Hoo Fan Chon
I Enjoy Being A Girl (2022, 37 mins.)
This photo-video essay is part of an ongoing project “Anita & Ava – Photography as a Self-restorative Tool”, which looks at how two childhood friends explored their gender identity through photography, as they transitioned into adulthood. Fan Chon originally found this series of photographic portraits in an antique shop in Penang. The portraits were of the late Ava Leong taken in the 1950s and 1960s in which she self-restored from an adolescent boy to a woman.
After the artist got in touch with Ava’s surviving lifelong friend, Anita, the collection expanded and he carried out a series of interviews with Anita to gather background information on these photographs. A compilation of Anita’s voices is used as the foundation of this video essay. These audio clips are juxtaposed with a selection of Ava and Anita’s photographic collection that reveals their journey of self-discovery through studio photography and other social activities, Anita’s working experience as a school lab technician and her life on stage as a woman impersonator. These photographs symbolise a time when they, together with their peers from the transgender community, were allowed to explore their sense of self while contributing to a lively cosmopolitan artistic culture in Malaysia.
Artist bio
Hoo Fan Chon is a visual arts practitioner based in Penang, Malaysia. His research-driven projects are often set in local geographies and concern class aspiration, cultural identity, informal histories, and colonial legacy. By reframing everyday life with irony and wry humour, his works observe the oscillations and assimilations between social classes, the official and the informal, the highbrow and the lowbrow. His practice aims to “mengataskan yang kampung, kampungkan yang atas,” which can be translated as, “to make fancy the village, to make village the fancy.”
He is currently doing a research residency hosted by IASPIS in Stockholm. He has been selected as part of the Moving Narratives Cycle II cohort, a mentorship programme organized by the Prince Claus Fund in collaboration with the British Council in 2025. His works were featured in “Myth Makers: Spectrosynthesis III” in Hong Kong and “The Oceans and the Interpreters” in Taipei, Dhaka, and Lagos. His solo exhibitions include “The World is Your Restaurant” (Kuala Lumpur, 2021) and “Let Them Eat Salmon” (Singapore, 2023). Hoo graduated with a BA in Photography from the London College of Communication (2010) and co-founded the Run Amok art collective (2012–17) in George Town.