Studies on Smiling II (Black Odonata), 2019, live performance and poems
Studies on Smiling (2019–2021) investigates the racialized and gendered politics of the “polite smile” among Asian migrant women working in Western service economies. The project began by collecting and organizing online images of smiling Asian women, treating these photographs as a dataset shaped by cultural expectation, labor hierarchies, and racialized visibility. By reading these smiles as a form of affective data — gestures produced, circulated, and consumed within sociotechnical systems — the work traces how emotional expression becomes standardized, disciplined, and monetized under conditions of migrant labor.
Through performance and poetry, the fictional character Black Odonata re-performs and re-codes these smiles, exposing their dual function as both survival tactic and subtle resistance within extractive economies of affective work. The project examines how certain gestures become legible or desirable within public and algorithmic cultures, while others remain invisible or misread. Studies on Smiling translates a digital archive into an embodied critique, foregrounding the body as a site of affective data production — a place where histories of migration, labor, and racialization are stored, negotiated, and reinterpreted through movement.
Photography: Julia Pfister-Mischkowski