This Is Not My Kink
Practice-led Installation, Performance & Participatory Research | Gendered Power, BDSM as an Analytical Language, and Feminist Material Translation

---

Xindi Sun, London, UK | 2025

· Investigates how BDSM can be understood beyond sexual practice as a critical framework for analysing submission, intimacy, and gendered power, situated within the context of contemporary gender norms in China.

· Develops a practice-based methodology that combines testimony, material translation, performance, and participatory research. Anonymous testimonies from Touchable Letters—addressing inadequate sex education, bodily shame, and intimate experience—are printed onto tracing paper and transformed into BDSM objects, including collars, gags, blindfolds, and restraints, which are worn by a transgender performer. Testimony is no longer presented as text to be read but becomes a material medium through which relations of power are enacted, bringing women's lived experiences directly into discussions of embodiment, power, and intimacy.

· Extends this inquiry through a comparative study of traditional Chinese wedding rituals and BDSM practices, alongside a reinterpretation of the Chinese nursery rhyme Little Bunny, Be Good (Xiao Tuzi Guai Guai). Rather than treating BDSM solely as a sexual practice, the project repositions it as an analytical language for examining how submission, gender performance, and relational power are continually produced through everyday culture.

· Exhibited as part of the Royal College of Art MFA Graduate Show and invited for presentation at Love and Power, an interdisciplinary symposium organised by the London School of Economics (LSE), University of the Arts London (UAL), and the Royal College of Art (RCA), contributing to public discussions on feminist practice, intimacy, and contemporary gender politics in China.