Transexperiences

Overall, I thought this reading was a bit difficult to comprehend, because a lot of what transexperience is, is intangible and is really very hard to describe. The most basic definition that Chen Zhen uses is “the complex life experiences of leaving one’s native place and going from one place to another in one’s life.” This is pretty straightforward. Throughout the interview Chen Zhen adds to his first definition. He says that transexperiences are a “special mode of thinking and a special process of experience-accumulating” but these are not physical “experience-accumulations.” Rather, a state of life which allow an artist to “blur the rationalization of art and the mechanization of artistic styles.”

Something else I had difficulty comprehending is less directly related to transexperiences but the idea of an alter-ego. Zhu Xian is Chen Zhen’s alter-ego. But what does that really mean? Beyonce is said to have an alter-ego (Sash Fierce) when she performs. Or maybe someone who has anger management issues, might say they have an alter-ego when they’re angry. But, these two cases seem circumstantial. How can Chen Zhen and Zhu Xian co-exist is such a tight space?