Picture windows into a club life, Frank Torng’s HerShe is an aperture into the Drag Queen and Go-Go Boy emotional response of this rerouting world. Intimate portraits as overtures to compelling extravagance, candid or impromptu enactment offers us a study into this “third gender” and performance experience. Torng captures ritual dress and dressing, creating memories, memorials to his backstage family that shares dazzling goals and values.
Understanding this familial intimacy, Torng tightly composes his pictures. His photography resonate defining interplays of colour that expose this reality with deliberate articulation. Torng’s access to pre and post theatrical activity, association with characterizations created from behind the scenes creates work without fear of reprisal or need to conceal his observations. He produces refreshing candour. The reverie and admiration for his focus heightens our enthusiasm for his subjects. Torng’s exacting photographs are unadulterated portrayals within this segment of gay culture, bringing reliable documentation into view.
Torng, as an invited guest since boyhood, provides a fond record of spectacular events. Rather than peeking or peering through his lens, his convivial interchange protrudes throughout HerShe. The performers’ costumed facades become extroverted wonder through Torng faithful displays. Here, there is a Nan Goldin and Cindy Sherman influence. However, Torng does not detonate with the Goldin ribald impertinence or execute a Sherman staging. Torng salutes the ClubKids genre, related to the infamous Michael Alig, however, HerShe demonstrates intrinsic respect for these performers. Portraits exude sexuality, saturated with consideration.
As an emerging artist that eclipses perfunctory societal bias through his humanity, Frank Torng has obtained formal recognition by winning the University of Victoria BMO 1st Art Award, 2010 and has been shortlisted for the Future Generation Art Prize (results pending). Torng’s work quietly punctuates desires with acquisitive expertise.
Fifty Fifty Arts Collective 2516 Douglas St. Victoria, BC
3 June – 24 June 2010 Video
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