(New York, NY) – The cursor scrolls down a forum thread reviewing massage workers: user ratings, objectifying descriptions that reduce people into numbers, and the anonymous accounts sharing transactional lust. These screen recordings open Ke Zhang’s “Massage Baby!”, and they dissolve the boundaries between documentation and invention even before a single actor has been shown. When Coco, a Chinese massage worker and the protagonist of the piece played by Ke Zhang herself, sits behind strings of pink plastic beads on a lilac-lit massage bed, the film already hints at its method of approaching its subject, not through the transparency that documentary claims to provide, but through the fundamental mechanisms of its construction.
Coco’s opening questions to the director were not about the story or the scene, but about her physical appearance on camera: the dress, the hair, the shading of her face. This self-consciousness plants the film’s central and recurring anxiety on visibility and agency, a constant negotiation between how one is seen visually and wholly.
“Massage Baby!” premiered at Accent Sisters on March 29, 2026. Shot using improvisation and built from the artist’s real encounters with massage workers in Flushing, New York, where disguised sexual labor exists in immigrant commerce, the work was created in a mode resembling a mockumentary. The film follows Coco as she is interviewed for an ostensible documentary by a crew whose real intentions are rendered legible only in English. The translator mediates between not just two languages, but also two epistemologies, one complicit and the other oblivious. What is particularly compelling about Zhang’s approach is how she lends her own physicality to inhabit a fluctuating condition that is not hers, but is also not not hers.
This is the liminal terrain first mapped by scholar Richard Schechner when describing performance as existing in the gap between “not me” and “not not me”, where performers are always suspended between themselves and their characters. When preparing for the film, Zhang moved beyond pure observation. She walked across the streets of Flushing alongside the massage workers she had come to know, occupying the same spatial and social positions, and drawing the same kind of attention and solicitations. This kind of embodied knowledge Zhang gravitates toward is a form of fieldwork that not only lingers in a speculator’s perspective but inhabits the research’s own flesh, enabling a fluctuating presence on screen. There are multiple moments in the film where Coco and Ke Zhang cease to be clearly distinguishable: when Coco speaks in a southern accent, when she smooths her skirt down, or when she tosses her wig aside to dodge an intrusive question from the crew. These were not scripted acting moments but organic ruptures. An expressive vocabulary rooted in specific histories of migration, gender, and class emerges through Zhang’s body, Coco’s body, and perhaps the bodies of a much larger group of women, belonging entirely to no one and quietly to everyone. There is an emotional audacity in the work that makes it politically powerful, as it deviates from the voyeuristic extraction that many documentaries which center on marginalized populations may risk doing. Instead, it creates a semi-fictional site for different bodily knowledge to converge rather than repel one another.
During the Q&A post screening, Zhang was asked about her choice of form: why make a mockumentary instead of shooting a documentary, especially as she already spent time meeting and connecting with massage workers in Flushing? Her response was illuminating. She mentioned that the documentary form promises an “authenticity” and “truthfulness” which she grows suspicious of over time. Her distrust of an implicit guarantee of representation ultimately inspires her to seek alternative forms, one which does not obscure the editorial power that filmmakers always hold. The result is not an evasion of “truth,” but a reimagining of its shape, repositioning it from recordings to a trained body, accessible but always partial.
In “No Archive Will Restore You” by Julietta Singh, Singh conceives of the body as an “impossible archive” of both personal and collective traces, resisting a clean, institutional organization. In a conversation with Barbara Browning on how the text is situated within a highly personal yet representation context, Singh articulated a response that directly speaks to “Massage, Baby”! : “I am unabashedly myself, and I am unequivocally not-myself. I am also, at times—and perhaps especially in the title—one of the collective members of the “you” that the book keeps summoning.” Singh’s idea echoes with the film’s fundamental tension between “Coco” and “Ke Zhang”, between the singular and the collective, between witness and invention. While Singh navigates through the first and second person textually, Zhang explores it through the doubled body, demonstrating the possibility of transcendental empathy, of a melding between what we know and how we live.
The film’s treatment of language advances this thesis into another terrain. With the majority of dialogue conducted in Chinese between Coco and the translator, the crew’s real intention unfolds in English, a register that secluded Coco. That exploitation was never stated or revealed but clearly anticipated and enacted. This linguistic hierarchy is a structural embodiment of the power dynamics that dictate the lives of these immigrant massage workers: an inaccessibility to information that is ultimately a form of violence. Language has always been inherently political, but here its act of betrayal makes it the very ground that perpetuates gendered and cultural oppression.
In its final sequence, the film demonstrates a hallucinatory texture that is at once visually fascinating and thematically critical. With the perspective shifting out of the documentary setting, a hidden camera is revealed. When Coco discovers its presence and leans into it, the lens cuts to her waking up under red light and pressing fake lashes directly onto the lens, slightly blurring the screen. This ambiguous moment elucidates the sophistication that this film honors. The gesture is at once submission and assertion; it is soft but radical. Instead of confronting the camera’s gaze, she acknowledges it, turning the instrument of surveillance into an object of attention. The lashes cannot conceal what has already been stripped of privacy, but that patient, gentle press is a devastating defiance that asks the reader what it means to witness and how it can affect us.
Zhang’s practice shares a lineage with artists like Wu Tsang and Lynne Sachs, who work against the extrapolative logic that marginal lives are being made visible. Throughout Zhang’s work, corporeality is emphasized as a site that not just illustrates social conditions but is its very landscape. In her previous work “If Longing has a Color, It Must be Sino-Red (2026)”, this message was conveyed more explicitly: Zhang massages a skull, strips herself, and covers the skull in red paint. The gradual and almost inevitable deprivation of the gendered and occupational self is continuous with “Massage Baby!” As Zhang stated after the premiere, she was hoping the work would not attach itself to any specific persons, faces, or names, but rather would embody a symbolic examination of an ongoing condition. When the fake lashes linger in front of the camera with the soft sound of breathing in the background, the gesture becomes owned by Coco, Ke Zhang, and the audience. In that moment, the tactility of that condition is felt: persistent, aching, and repelling any easy resolution.
Review by Cynthia Langyue Chen
Cynthia Langyue Chen is a writer based in New York City, originally from Shanghai. Her writings can be found in mercuryfirs, grotto journal, No,dear, The Margins, The Common, Epiphany, Impulse Magazine, Cultbytes, and elsewhere. Her work has also been supported by the Community of Writers, Beijing Poetry Festival, and Accent Sisters. Her chapbook Believing YoYo is out from Tilted House Press.
Film Credits
DIRECTOR / EDITOR: Ke Zhang
SCRIPT CONSULTANT: Erique Huang
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Xin Du / Erique Huang
SOUND: Anni Hu / Jennie Xinyi Tan
ADVISOR: Shelly Silver
(text & photo courtesy of Ke Zhang & Cynthia Langyue Chen)
