David Khang is a hack and he knows it. While he’s tried for years to master calligraphy, all he can manage are basic lines and circles. Secondly, if Khang is an authentic imitator of some derivative Derridian logic, he is a bad one, for a closed system of high theory leaves little room for the uncontrollable utterances of disgust, despair, choking, gagging, bursts of air-laughter, sighs, or breathless pauses that are likely experienced by his audience. By steeping his (e)masculated 'Asian' performances and their subsequent documentation in mystique, silence and self-reflexivity, he is splitting hairs - between the identifications into which his audience might fall too easily and the identifications he resists. Khang's simple gestures—a line in space, a miraculously perfect circle of ten foot diameter—throw meaning and interpretation outside the frame, activating an internal language for the viewer. As his bare prosthetic tongue scrapes across the dry paper stage, the visceral itself is eviscerated and meaning left hanging in the air like a translucent skin. The rest of the work drips in motor oil. This well-lubricated system continues to inscribe Khang's naked body with racialized and excessive markers, a hyperbole that tends toward the burlesque. Watching Khang we might consider the Duchampian concept of the 'infra-thin' - where some hint of the past taints the present like the warmth that lingers on a seat. For Khang this residue is the coextensive meaning found between his performed, expected identity and the body of his text. But in layering these supposedly sincere gestures, he also performs a sleight of hand. So the question remains: how does the trick unhand the magician? In this effort, Khang is master again over himself. But language? Leave that to the French. by Carrie Paterson

"Bleeding Book," video projection, reflective ink pool, (2004) "Linea Lingua," video projection, variable dimensions (2004)