Asian women walk an unfortunate line in the minds and horny fantasies of media. We’re sexualized, yet also rarely portrayed as sexual. At her most desirable, an Asian woman is modest and demure. Anime encourages this. Western media encourages this. My parents encourage this too. As an Asian woman, I am starved for images of other Asian women who are sexy, who have sex, and who are empowered by the fact that they have sex. When I started talking to my other Asian friends about how we understood our identity as Asian women and our identity as sexual beings, I found that I wasn’t the only one who had a hard time understanding how the two fit together.
I am confident, and I know I am desired, thus desirable. But I have a hard time feeling sexy. It almost feels taboo. The only time I really feel sexy is when I take a nude. There, I have full control over what I look like, what I do, and, to some degree, who gets to see it. When I posed the idea of making a zine of nudes, many of my peers told me they felt the same way. ‘Wanna See a Nude?’ is a compilation of nudes from Asian women, drawn digitally and printed using a risograph printer. Their only direction was to send me a picture where they felt hot. My goal was to portray their bodies in a way that felt honest and true to them. ‘Wanna See a Nude?’ shows the sexuality of Asian women as they define it when they wield the lens.
