The China Girl might as well be a figment of your imagination in analog film, appearing in a flash between the countdowns that begin every reel. It is an image of a woman, often anonymous, who poses in front of color bars as a device for calibrating color and density. This practice existed since the 1920s and is defunct in current media production.

In the context of this exhibition, where two collaborative practices one generation apart are placed alongside each other, the China Girl recalls several possibilities of comparison and parallelism in matters of equivocal identities and technology used in engaging these personas.

Alice and Lucinda is an invention of artists Yasmin Sison and Lena Cobangbang. Two-fold in nature, Alice and Lucinda act as the pseudonyms of the artists respectively but at the same time function as a collaborative concept. This project first appeared in Lunar Landing, an art-based zine that was initiated in 1998 and then expanded to a series of works that deal primarily with media, celebrity-hood, myths and fictions, and the creation of multiple realities in the name of fun. However, the playfulness present in Alice and Lucinda proposes complex, calculated, and process-based fictions that take the form of installation, performances, photography, and video mantled by lo-fi, DIY aesthetics.

Readymade China Girls revives two major video works by Alice and Lucinda. “The Salenga Experience” is a triptych video that shadows Alice and Lucinda in their expedition to find the mysterious urban character of Salenga. The graffiti text ‘The Filipino discovered that the electron is positive,’ tagged with the name of Salenga, had popped up in several areas of Manila, prompting Alice and Lucinda to a hunt that included them traversing Manila through individual channels, providing an oral documentation of their interviews to peers and people native to Manila who claim to have information about Salenga. The three-channel projection, “The Incredible Lives of Alice and Lucinda,” also present Alice and Lucinda performing individually in a particular setting. They wear a type of clothing descriptive of a certain character and improvise whatever such chosen character is apt to do. The center channel that intersperses between cable channels places Alice and Lucinda in such a way that sometimes typify B-movie or documentary-like real life settings. The work seeks to stress “the many ways reality can be conceived and perceived in concurrent with media and media’s immense influence in the production and fleshing out of such fantasies and wishes” (Lena Cobangbang, 1999). Catalina Africa and Maria Jeona’s “Girls On Grass ++ Spank Jol3na and the Incredible Lives of A&L” in The Project Room responds to Alice and Lucinda’s debut exhibition in Surrounded By Water in 1999 that included the video “The Incredible Lives of Alice and Lucinda.” Fashioned in the form of a shrine rather than the shop setting Alice and Lucinda put together for their exhibition, Catalina and Jeona’s rendition in Readymade China Girls parallels the similar practice of catering to any identity desired. “Pool of Tears Remix Shrine” and “Salvation Mountain Shake by Savant” are new versions of the emerging pair’s works that propose new channels of projecting their joint fantasies separate from their individual art-making.

The two collaborative pairs exist a generation apart, not informed by each other but by the conditions contemporary to their practices. Despite the technological discrepancies in the format and resource pool of their works—analog versus digital, the limitations and the availability of information—Alice and Lucinda, and Catalina and Jeona maintain self-sufficient projects that construct multiple realities. As much as Alice and Lucinda continue to be acknowledged as the alter egos of Yasmin Sison and Lena Cobangbang, Alice and Lucinda endures as a concept present in the dynamics of collaborative work that navigates process-based projects in distinctive low-tech production style and other DIY aesthetics and methods. Similar to the China Girl, the identities nurtured by Alice and Lucinda remain ambiguous, and yet Alice and Lucinda continues to churn out projects however, whenever, wherever, whatever indefinitely.

‍