This is my fourth response in my series on Decolonial Art History. I’ve been following a virtual course taught by scholars from around the world, and my goal has been to respond to each class with some form of reflection that I share on Killer Instinct. The intention is simple: to stay actively engaged, to immerse myself in the material rather than passively absorb it. I’ve been deeply enjoying the process. If you missed the first three responses, they’re linked below.

For this entry, I created a collage in homage to the Chinese artist Pan Yuliang. I encountered her work in a lecture titled Birth and Decay in Sites of Flux: Agentive Traces from Art of mid-20th Century in East and South-East Asia, taught by Professor Eileen Legaspi Ramirez of the University of the Philippines Diliman Department of Art Studies. What struck me most was Yuliang’s life story as told by her different names and how she complicates art historical research.

Professor Ramirez spoke candidly about the challenges of researching Yuliang. The artist appears under multiple names in the archival record. Research tends to assume stability: one name and one searchable identity.

Yuliang unsettles that expectation.

Professor Ramirez also discussed the tension between how Yuliang chose to represent herself and what emerges about her life through sustained research. How do we honor self-portrayal while acknowledging the fuller historical record? Yuliang insists on that question with unusual force.

Born Chen Xiuqing in Yangzhou, Jiangsu in 1895, she was later renamed Zhang Yuliang after being orphaned and sold into sex work by her uncle at fourteen. Her name changed again when she became a second wife and adopted her husband’s surname, becoming Pan Yuliang, a name she ultimately claimed as her own. These shifts were shaped by class, gender, vulnerability, and survival. Her multiple names reflect both structural constraint and personal agency.

Professor Ramirez noted that Yuliang herself never publicly spoke of her experience in sex work. That knowledge emerged later through research. This raises a delicate ethical question: how do scholars integrate biographical truths that an artist did not foreground?

Where is the line between contextualization and intrusion?

In my collage, I include Yuliang’s self-portraits as a way of centering her own acts of self-fashioning. Her legacy poses productive challenges to scholars today. What does it mean to sign oneself into history under a name that has been imposed, changed, and reclaimed?

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Previous Class Responses

Class 1

Class 2

Class 3

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Further Reading

From Brothel to Biennale. How Pan Yuliang Rewrote Her Destiny Through Art

It’s Saturday night, hunters.

I’m serving a Shelf Life review of Liv Zander’s Feathers So Vicious.

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Unicorn Cake is a weekly segment I release on Saturday nights — a serving that’s equal parts erotic and intellectual. There’s a Unicorn Cake tab at the top of my site where you can explore past episodes.

If you’re a new hunter here, welcome! I’m Kitty Killer, the creator of Killer Instinct, your cultural dispatch for Black diasporic life and sharp media critique. I also host a live internet radio show called Killer Frequency, every Friday at 1 p.m. AST. Killer Frequency is a Black diasporic variety seminar for the culturally curious. If you click the Killer Frequency tab at the top of my site, it will also take you to the site where my show is hosted.

Take a look around and plan to join me on Friday!

If you’re a returning hunter and you’ve enjoyed a few of my posts, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support this work monetarily. For just $5/month, you can access posts like this one behind the wall.

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First Episode:

Second Episode:

Killer Instinct is a cultural dispatch on Black diasporic life and sharp media critique. I host a live Internet radio show called Killer Frequency every Friday at 1pm AST—join me. Support, subscribe, and stay sharp 🗡.

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Simone’s voice note diary

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Killer Instinct is a cultural dispatch on Black diasporic life and sharp media critique. I host a live Internet radio show called Killer Frequency every Friday at 1pm AST—join me. Support, subscribe, and stay sharp 🗡.

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Sometimes what’s forbidden is going back.

“You still want to talk about that girl,” Damian taunted.

His thumb and forefinger pressed against Elise’s throat, constraining her vocal cords just enough to stir alarm. She held her breath, waiting.

Fear surged through her, tempered by the strange comfort of his undivided focus. He squeezed tighter, more insistent now. Her eyes rolled back as her mind slipped to a memory—the last time they had touched, years ago.

He had made her moan another woman’s name: Simone.

Elise’s tongue brushed the edge of her lips, as if tasting the name now. Mouth wet at the sweet, tense recollection as she wondered if he would ever give her breath back.

His grip at her throat snapped her head into the pillow, only to release her as suddenly as he’d claimed her. “You’re thinking about it now, aren’t you?” he whispered. She gasped, inhaling sharply. He leaned his lips into her ear and provoked. “Answer me.”

His tongue traced a line from her ear down her neck to her chest, sweeping her left nipple.

The memories hurt and pleased her at once, and that contradiction made him hard.

He thought of Simone’s curves bouncing out of her gym clothes.

Elise had pleaded with him at the time: “You’re just a man, baby,” and he was. He bent the truth when he told her nothing happened.

He wanted them both.

Elise was the one he couldn’t do without, though.

But she had walked away and stopped speaking to him for years after. He never thought he’d have her like his again.

Her legs wrapped around his hips as her chest arched into his mouth.

He knew her body like a captain knows his oceans, but time turned him rusty now.

Unsure.

Distracted.

Elise sank into her fantasies, moaning sex talk from a tale he hadn’t been told, though the context made her meaning clear: “I want whatever you’re having, baby.”

He shoved her chest back with one hand and cracked the other hard across her face. “Don’t get mad when I lie to you.” He tore her legs free, raising them to his ears before plunging downward.

Simone had once reassured her over the phone: “It’s nothing. Nothing happened.”

Elise pictured Damian driving into Simone as payment for betraying his girlfriend, just as he’d ordered. “Yes, baby.”

“Good girl,” He praised her. She tortured herself with visions of Simone’s eyes meeting hers as he moved inside her, both of them relishing a desire so fierce it twisted into betrayal. “Now beg me for it.” His tongue swiped at her clit as it pulsed so hard she forgot who she was before it slid inside of her.

“Please, Damian.”

He knew her inside and out.

The rise and fall of her tones.

How her body ached against its own desires.

Sometimes, Elise begged him to let her confess how much she loved thinking of him with Simone; the next moment, she turned cold towards him.

Then she didn’t speak to him for years. Which had turned his hunger inside out.

He held it together, but his frustration had manifested in a busted door.

Patience worn thin.

Having her now reminded him of how the absence had stung. The strain of yearning for someone who no longer saw you. Only their delusions of what may have been with another. “That ass, baby, it’s too fat.” She was still there.

Almost there.

His tongue pulled her clit between his lips, and he sucked one time, hard, until she started to quake. As if he was pulling it out of her. “I’m cumming in your mouth.”

Never spin the block, they say. But she couldn’t stay away.

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Killer Instinct is a cultural dispatch on Black diasporic life and sharp media critique. I host a live Internet radio show called Killer Frequency every Friday at 1pm AST—join me. Support, subscribe, and stay sharp 🗡.

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In this episode of Unicorn Cake, I spotlight ’s recent article, “Why Sex Gets Quiet in Long-Term Relationships",” which is linked below. Read it alongside these stormy reflections!

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Killer Instinct is a cultural dispatch on Black diasporic life and sharp media critique. I host a live Internet radio show called Killer Frequency every Friday at 1pm AST—join me. Support, subscribe, and stay sharp 🗡.

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An exploration of infidelity as part of the cuckquean kink.

What listeners are saying:

• “It was a great conversation starter. We probably talked for about 2 hours about it. I think this is going to make our relationship even better than it already was!” a listening cuckquean

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Killer Instinct is a cultural dispatch on Black diasporic life and sharp media critique. I host a live Internet radio show called Killer Frequency every Friday at 1pm AST—join me. Support, subscribe, and stay sharp 🗡.

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An exploration of the term “fincake"

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Killer Instinct is a cultural dispatch on Black diasporic life and sharp media critique. I host a live Internet radio show called Killer Frequency every Friday at 1pm AST—join me. Support, subscribe, and stay sharp 🗡.

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Findom to feed the sexual imagination.

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Killer Instinct is a cultural dispatch on Black diasporic life and sharp media critique. I host a live Internet radio show called Killer Frequency every Friday at 1pm AST—join me. Support, subscribe, and stay sharp 🗡.

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The resistance to paying for our deepest desires.

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Killer Instinct is a cultural dispatch on Black diasporic life and sharp media critique. I host a live Internet radio show called Killer Frequency every Friday at 1pm AST—join me. Support, subscribe, and stay sharp 🗡.

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The lived reality of our fantasies.

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Killer Instinct is a cultural dispatch on Black diasporic life and sharp media critique. I host a live Internet radio show called Killer Frequency every Friday at 1pm AST—join me. Support, subscribe, and stay sharp 🗡.

Share Killer Instinct