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# So Many Emotions and Gay Love Cliches
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/so-many-emotions-and-gay-love-cliches/
- Published: 2015-06-05T21:02:27.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:43:20.000Z
- Description: Artist Jennifer Chan is masterful at remixing images and video clips from pop culture, overlaying text with a '90s special-effects aesthetic and often setting the carefully coordinated pieces to catchy pop songs.
- Author: Jillian Steinhauer
- Tags: Opinion, Videodrome, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 07:08 (2014, 2015, part 2)

![(GIF by Hrag Vartanian/Hyperallergic)](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2015/06/jen-chan-640.gif)

(GIF by Hrag Vartanian/Hyperallergic)

Artist [Jennifer Chan](http://jennifer-chan.com/?ref=hyperallergic.com) is masterful at remixing images and video clips from pop culture, overlaying text with a ’90s special-effects aesthetic and often setting the carefully coordinated pieces to catchy pop songs. And so, when I first watched her video “P.A.U.L.” (2013), I thought she had re-cut clips from anime episodes to turn them into a gay love story, as a critique of dominant cultural narratives.

But the truth is even more fascinating: she actually pulled her clips from two episodes of *Yaoi*,or “boys love,” anime, which she [describes as](http://animalnewyork.com/2014/artists-notebook-jennifer-chan/?ref=hyperallergic.com) “a genre of gay anime that’s predominantly female-authored and female-oriented in interests.” She does so with incredible timing and rhythm, reworking the episodes into an explosive, high-stakes, four-minute love story — complete with flan, sexual innuendo, pictures of bears, a techno version of “My Heart Will Go On,” and *so many feelings*.

“P.A.U.L.” is an unabashed accumulation of clichés, walking a fine line between earnest and knowing. It lets you both see yourself and get totally lost in a genre that’s also riddled with contradictions: a branch of pop culture but a subcategory, about “boys love” but largely written by women. It’s these dissonances and distances that Chan is so good at exposing, so entertainingly.