A girl in every port

A search for cultural roots takes photographer Reagan Louie into Asia's sex industry.

By Glen Helfand

Sep 12, 2003 | Sexual tourism is a red-hot button on the scale of politically correct travel. While ostensibly about pleasure, jetting off to partake in exotic, erotic smorgasbords for a price is an activity that taps directly into deeply ingrained perceptions of gender, race and uncomfortable global intercourse between First, Second and Third World cultures. For San Francisco Bay Area photographer Reagan Louie, this rich territory, spiked with ideological land mines and oases of sparkling female beauty, serves as something more complex and ambiguous.

As a second-generation Asian American, Louie has made a personal and artistic practice of traveling East in a photographic search to reclaim his roots. In the 1980s, he visited his father's birthplace in China, creating a visual record of the eye-opening, vibrant color pictures that for him, and many viewers, create a link between China and Chinese American identity. "A psychologist might say that my search had been caused by 'cultural marginalization,'" he wrote of that series, "In Search of a True Life" -- something that for him became an ongoing project about postcolonialism.

In the mid-1990s, during picture-gathering trips to Asia, Louie homed in on the sex trade, which is the basis of his recently released book, "Orientalia," as well as an exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, "The Photographs of Reagan Louie: Sex Work in Asia" (through December 17).

These are portraits of women in China, Japan, Thailand, Korea and Southeast Asia that, for the artist, express a dynamic of Asian male sexuality as seen through images of women. The pictures are crisp and colorful visions of clothed and unclothed prostitutes -- hostesses in karaoke bars, masseuses, or employees in betelnut kiosks or glassed-in shacks on roadsides that sell various pleasures to go. Sometimes these women are seen with men, but more often they look to the camera and, by extension, to the photographer from a difficult-to-read position. As SFMoMA curator Sandra Phillips describes them in her wall text, the pictures "offer a dispassionate examination of a topic that is both controversial and conflicted."

This is the angle Louie takes in conversation about his art. "All my work is about how society shapes an individual to some degree," he says. "The first time I went to Asia in 1980, I experienced a different kind of dynamic between men and women. Not that we [Asian men] are exactly emasculated in the U.S., but we're somewhat neutered. Asia has very masculine societies; men have a dominant role. I was aware of it from the beginning, but I didn't know what to do with it."

His first-ever visit to a sex emporium in Hong Kong, where he was shooting during the hand-over from the British in 1997, was an eye opener that jumpstarted the project. Louie, a family man with wife, kids and a dignified job as a professor at the San Francisco Art Institute, entered a new world that offered very distinct examples of the gender dynamic.

Next Page: The primary venue is the karaoke parlor

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