Kef Zheng ’22

kef is an artist from Vernon, Connecticut, currently based in the city of Portland, Maine— attempting to navigate her existence as an Asian American trans artist. kef is interested in how sense of identity and relationships to the world are constructed through encountered ideas and representations. Her work engages with themes such as gender and performativity, personal relationships, and the violence of the Western and cisnormative male gaze. In kef’s work she identifies with a reality of being rejected by a world, in search of solidarity and connecting with others who contend with a similar existence. kef works closely with the notion of intercorporeality- the ensembles of touch, connection, embodied intimacy, and identification that circulate between subjects. The subversion that her practice performs is not in the image or in the representation, but in the simple act of being able to be next to one another.