in black the body will gleam interrogates visibility and invisibility as twin strategies for disrupting the Western gaze that has long exoticized and objectified Asian bodies. Pairing each image with a text fragment, the work weaves visual and literary forms that move between obscurity and defiance.

Inverting the terms of exotification, the Asian American subjects in these images radiate a charged inner eroticism that unsettles rather than satisfies. In the tension between revelation and refusal, exposure and opacity, these image-text pairings ask: who has the right to our bodies? What is lost or gained in the representation of the Asian subject? The political stakes of this refusal are clear: in a world that commodifies identity, choosing opacity can be a form of protection, protest, and care.

Together, the work reconfigures the stakes of visibility for Asian Americans —not as surfaces to decode or consume, but as complex presences oscillating between intimacy and absence, vulnerability and control. It becomes a reclamation of selfhood without the demand for comprehension.