Can someone still determine how she will be seen when she cannot fully understand the language being used to describe her? In Ke Zhang’s Massage Baby!(2026), mistranslation is not simply an obstacle to communication but a structure of power. Words pass among a Chinese woman working in massage, a Mandarin-speaking interpreter, and an English-speaking director. Information is reduced, delayed, or withheld. The woman before the camera becomes visible while remaining partly excluded from the image being built around her.
The film was presented from July 18 to 20 in B*O/D&Y, an international group exhibition at Gallery 46 in London. Produced by SPIRA9 ART and bringing together forty artists from a range of backgrounds, the exhibition considered how bodies are continually reshaped by technology, ecology, memory, and social systems. Its central concept was the glitch: not merely a mechanical failure, but a rupture through which a previously hidden structure can suddenly appear.
Within this expansive group exhibition, Zhang’s work warranted particular attention because it translated the glitch from an abstract technological concept into a concrete social experience. In her film, malfunction occurs across translation, performance, and unequal access to information—where a woman’s lived body begins to separate from the image the camera manufactures for her. Massage Baby! engages several of the exhibition’s central concerns at once, including the body, technology, and systems of power. Yet it never reduces the body to a symbol. Instead, it reveals how a body is interpreted, adjusted, and remade within the specific relations of a film production.
This inquiry also resonated with the curatorial framework of B*O/D&Y at Gallery 46, an independent East London art venue presenting emerging and international artists across moving image, performance, installation, and interdisciplinary forms. By locating the exhibition’s concept of the glitch within translation, labour, and unequal access to information, Massage Baby! expanded its investigation of the mediated body beyond technological malfunction, connecting its London presentation to questions shaped by Chinese diasporic life in New York.
Ke Zhang (KEKEZ) is a New York-based Chinese moving-image artist, filmmaker, and performer who received her MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts. Her practice examines how women understand and present their bodies under the pressures of labor, intimacy, migration, and spectatorship. She has developed an approach that might be described as embodied documentary-fiction, combining sustained observation, reconstructed situations, composite characters, and the artist’s own physical presence. The body is both her subject and her instrument of research; through it, the ethics of representation become visible.
The character construction in Massage Baby! epitomises the strengths of this artistic methodology. Coco, the film’s central protagonist, is not a carbon copy of any single real individual. Instead, through long-form interviews and sustained immersive engagement with Chinese massage workers in New York, Ke Zhang distils the collective linguistic habits, bodily demeanours, labour rhythms and affective dispositions shared within this community. She synthesises and refashions these elements into a fictional archetype, which she performs herself.
This creative practice is anchored in rigorous ethical self-reflexivity. Ke Zhang rejects the false sense of authenticity conferred by an omniscient viewpoint, as well as the presumptuous ventriloquism that speaks over marginalised labour communities. Drawing upon their shared diasporic Chinese cultural roots to forge empathetic rapport, she remains sharply cognisant of the class and discursive disparities separating her own positional identity from these service labourers. By sidestepping the pervasive documentary pitfall of appropriating the lived experiences of the Other, her figures strike a delicate balance between archetypal authenticity and restrained artistic mediation.
In the staged interview at the center of the film, Coco speaks in regionally accented Mandarin about work, intimacy, and life in New York. English conversations around her disclose the director’s intentions, judgments, and production arrangements, but Coco can access only part of this information through an interpreter. Translation becomes both assistance and control. It enables her participation while determining how much she is allowed to know.
Yet Coco is never a passive subject who simply submits to the lens. She openly expresses discomfort with the clothes and shoes selected by the crew and worries that certain styling choices will not make her look good on camera. Although she ultimately wears the uncomfortable shoes because the production requires it, her compliance does not erase her objection. She also arrives wearing a wig of her own choosing, actively attempting to shape the image in which she will appear.
These details give Coco a restless, shifting energy. She resists, complains, compromises, and styles herself. She does not reject visibility; she struggles over the terms on which she will become visible. The wig, costume, and shoes are therefore more than styling. They become a site of negotiation between Coco and the production team. Aware that the camera is evaluating her and that her image will enter other people’s field of vision, she repeatedly tries to adjust the outcome from within the conditions imposed upon her.
This agency, however, does not place her on equal terms with the camera. Coco can object to a costume, alter her appearance, or produce emotions and gestures beyond the director’s expectations. What she cannot determine is which images will survive the edit, how her words will be translated, or through what narrative structure the audience will come to know her. The camera is not omnipotent, but it retains a position of structural authority: it controls framing, editing, and the distribution of information, ultimately deciding what the audience may see and what remains outside the image.
This contradiction is the film’s central force. Coco’s resistance is real, and so is the power of the camera. Neither cancels the other; they remain in collision throughout the production. Zhang neither fixes Coco as a victim awaiting sympathy nor packages her as a woman who easily achieves liberation. Resistance, desire, vanity, discomfort, and compromise coexist, allowing Coco to retain a complexity that no single political position can contain.
The structure gives the work a distinctly feminist argument. Simone de Beauvoir’s account of womanhood as socially produced, later extended by Judith Butler’s theory of gender as an effect of repeated acts, becomes tangible in the daily gestures of service labor: posture, tone, dress, availability, restraint, and the management of another person’s comfort.
Coco is neither a transparent victim nor a simple emblem of empowerment. She adjusts her behavior in response to her surroundings and decides how much to disclose. Femininity emerges both as a disciplined form of labor and as a bodily repertoire that can be used strategically. Zhang asks not what a woman essentially is, but how a female body becomes legible—intimate, compliant, desirable, foreign, or available—within a particular economy of images.
The film also complicates the division between the person who looks and the woman made into an image. Laura Mulvey’s influential critique of the cinematic gaze describes a visual order that arranges women for spectatorship. Zhang enters both sides of that order: as director, she constructs the image; as Coco, she gives her own body over to it.
This dual position does not erase the difference between artist and represented subject. It keeps that difference visible, preventing empathy from becoming an alibi for appropriating someone else’s experience. Zhang’s performance is persuasive because it sustains several contradictory states at once: self-aware yet exposed, playful and defiant yet guarded, conscious of the camera but unable to master everything taking place beyond the boundary of her language.
This internal tension between bodily negotiation and structural power runs through Ke Zhang’s wider body of work. In If Longing Has a Color, It Must Be Sino-Red (2024), the massage room and cross-cultural visual dissonance stage Asian femininity as a performative transaction shaped by the Western cinematic gaze. In Pas de deux (2022), the spatial confinement of a rehabilitation hospital turns physical vulnerability into an inquiry into diminished autonomy. Across these works, Zhang repeatedly tests documentary observation through performance, spatial restriction, and her own embodied presence, making lived experience central not only to their subjects but also to the formal construction of her moving-image practice.
Ke Zhang further extends this inquiry through cross-disciplinary performance. In Jen Liu’s TIME TRAVELER IN D-BLOCK (2026), she portrays an Asian female figure moving between ancient and contemporary worlds. Through precise shifts in gesture, posture, and physical bearing, Zhang gives bodily form to diasporic histories, digital gig labour, and persistent structures of gendered constraint, further developing her exploration of the body as both an expressive medium and a site shaped by social power.
Massage Baby! premiered at Accent Sisters in New York on March 29, 2026, as part of Watched Intimacies, a solo screening and artist conversation devoted to Zhang’s work. The event prompted discussion of her use of mockumentary and her distrust of documentary’s claims to authenticity. Four days after the Gallery 46 exhibition closed, Flohaus Gallery presented Repeat After Her on July 24, a solo event combining a screening of Massage Baby!, a new live performance developed in response to the film, and an artist talk. The format placed the film and a live response in the same programme, extending its questions about translated speech and embodied repetition into a live setting.
As Massage Baby! moved from New York to London, it entered another layer of translation. Experiences gathered from Chinese women in New York were brought into a British exhibition context by an artist whose own practice has been shaped across China and the United States. Diaspora here is not a stable identity carried intact from one country to another. It is continually produced through migration, labor, linguistic dependence, and repeated acts of interpretation. The work’s movement between cultural contexts does not eliminate distance; it multiplies the places where the body can be misunderstood, renamed, and remade.
Set against the bold, unmitigated artistic expressions on view elsewhere in the exhibition, Ke Zhang’s rendering of the “glitch” carries subtle yet searing sharpness: incomplete translations, garments donned reluctantly, self-directed styling alterations, and the powerlessness to govern one’s own narrative. These minor ruptures embedded within ordinary daily life lay bare the core contradictions at the intersection of the body, language, identity and power.
All told, through her original creative methodology of embodied documentary-fiction, Ke Zhang reframes corporeal tensions and linguistic fractures into a fully formed, distinctive artistic lexicon. The core critical weight of her practice lies in its dual perspective: it affirms women’s vivid subjective vitality without diminishing the potency of individual resistance and self-staging, while adopting a lucid, restrained viewpoint to examine the structural power systems that discipline and delineate female bodies throughout image production and cross-cultural dissemination. Her oeuvre offers an indispensable speculative model for contemporary artistic production centred on Asian women’s corporeal imagery and identity politics.