This feature was originally published Friday the 13th, 2023 in print for WUSSY Vol. 12 — order a copy!

THE MENU

First Course (Hors d’oeuvre):
Buying Containers of Time

Second Course (Amuse-bouche):
Authentic Miracles

Third Course (Entrée):
The Cycle of Experience

Fourth Course (Palate Cleanser):
Humbled by Embodiment (Decay)

Last Course (Dessert):
Engineering Afterlives

What lies before you is a sumptuous cannibal feast of unprecedented proportions. Few will ever be fortunate enough to partake of this tantalizing abundance of epicurean delights, this mouthwatering assemblage of forbidden fruits. We meager worms at WUSSY are honored to present to you a singular culinary experience—the quintessential GIRL DINNER, exquisitely prepared and mercilessly tenderized by some of Satan’s favorite whores.

Empress Wu is notorious in the erotic underworld for her voracious and peculiar appetite. An internationally renowned professional Dominatrix, cultural activist, and conceptual artist who plays with the conventions of both sex work and kink as medium, Wu is a consummate gourmand of the grotesque, a visionary of excess. From carving the lyrics to “Linger” by The Cranberries into the flesh of a worthless sub, to filling a transparent plastic sex toy with live cockroaches, Empress Wu dominates in a lexicon entirely her own, harnessing the powers of memento mori, execution roleplay, and good old-fashioned le petite mort as a means of troubling traditional power dynamics and healing intergenerational trauma. Joined by her equally beguiling collaborator and fellow Dominatrix Cleo Ouyang, these torturous titans of industry converse about the commodification of time, the transfiguration of pain, and the divine miracles of being consumed.

BUYING CONTAINERS OF TIME

Cleo Ouyang: For this interview my mind immediately went to artists who work with the medium of time. Obviously, Tehching Tsieh, a big influence for both of us, but also artists who are further away from what we do like James Turrell. His works are containers for allowing time and space to unfold. My first question is about how you work with time in session.

Empress Wu: I'm particularly interested in time because it is ultimately at the center of the relationship between sex work and artwork; both arenas are attempting to sell time as a commodified object in some way.

These days sex work is selling by the hour, sometimes to escape a legal situation, but also to sell an experience. Artwork these days is moving towards time-based work — installations that decay, performance work, video work. Each is pointing to— and sometimes obscuring— the attempt to sell your patron a moment, an instant. This instant is supposed to be some sort of miracle, something that differentiates you from the rest in some way. You sell the miracle of connection.

A lot of sex workers position themselves as artists and think about the ways in which they can most creatively play with kink as a medium. The goal can be to create proof that you are a genius who has thought about art in a different way, or kink in a different way. There's an Italian word for it that Vasari used to talk about Michelangelo, disegno—the intellectual capacity to invent the drawing.

CO: I’m thinking about how capitalism has progressed, transforming everything around us until the very materials of life, space, and time are turned into a commodity.

EW: Even what we imagine will happen to the materials of life, space, and time has been commodified…speculative markets.

CO: The interesting thing about the way you're playing with temporality opens up. The question is no longer about the connection between sex work and artwork, but about the medium that you're working with and life.

EW: We have fooled ourselves into thinking that there's specialized forms of labor.

CO: Whereas it feels like you're using sex work as a medium to do life and to do time.

Another thing that I wanted to explore was this idea of the miracle, which is the kernel of what people are actually buying. They say they’re buying three hours in the dungeon, right? But what they're really buying is a moment where they feel connected. Can you say more about that?

AUTHENTIC MIRACLES

EW: There are a lot of really interesting conversations about performance work, and what it means to buy/sell/trade performance work as a commodity. What does it mean for one artist to perform another artist's work? I'm thinking about the performance that Marina Abramovich did at [The Guggenheim]. She performed a series of seven other artist’s keystone works, including Vito Acconci's Seedbed. I love Seedbed so much, because Vito’s just like me—masturbating under the floorboards. Amelia Jones wrote about the authenticity of reenacting performance work. A lot of people ask from artists that their work is real or authentic, and Amelia Jones kind of strikes at Abramovich and says it's not authentic, because it's not the same conditions that Vito had when he was at the Sonnabend gallery spending eight hours a day under the floorboards. While I was reading that essay, I was studying abroad in Italy, and we visited the Pinacoteca at this library. There was one really beautiful reliquary: a bust in the shape of St. Ursula. It was creepy, because the reliquary was meant to house her shriveled brain. You would open up the back of her head, and the relic would be inside.

What is our obsession with objects and authenticity? I think it has to do with a physical proximity to that moment in time in which a miracle was happening, a moment that can only be described as magic. Those moments of magic or miracle are very rare. We want to commodify them, and we want them to happen all the time. And they can't.

THE CYCLE OF EXPERIENCE

CO: What does it feel like to be the person attempting to hold and channel these miracles?

EW: It's an interesting question. Sometimes it works. When you get into a good flow state and when all of the timing is right, when you happen to find somebody that you're compatible with. Sometimes it doesn't work. Sometimes you don't feel it but the other person does…industry secrets.

CO: When was the first time you felt it?

EW: I had this client a long time ago. He was my first long-term FinDom client. I remember feeling with him that I spoke in a language that he so easily read. I was speaking in a specific register that seemed to hit his submission exactly right. The connection was instant.

What about you?

CO: There was this one client who you’ve also seen, and we were having this session, and he hated everything I was doing. He was like “Ow, don't twist my nipple like that, that hurts.” Everything was wrong. Then at a certain moment I felt there was nothing more to be done, so I said “Everything that we've done up to this point has been an ordeal for me to see if you are worthy of serving.” That was exactly the right thing to say to him. That was just what he wanted to hear, and he melted immediately. I hit on it totally by chance. I was just out of tactics.

EW: Funny when it hits on that exact right note. Our job is to find the note. Play the scale, find the note.

CO: So the moments of miraculous intimacy and connection. What happens after?

EW: That’s the high note. That’s the peak and then it starts to descend. I think we’ve ended up in these very fascinating cycles, where we keep finding that moment over and over again, in different ways and in different forms. We're stuck in that cycle. Some people think the cycle is bad. For me, the cycle is all there is, baby!

CO: It reminds me of the story of Faust.

EW: I am not familiar.

CO: Here's how the story goes. The devil comes to Faust. Faust is a nerd, a doctor – I don't know, but he spent all his life surrounded by books, living through this veil of intellectualism. The Devil's like, "Hey, in exchange for your eternal soul. I will give you one moment that is worth it. A moment of just pure bliss."

EW: Yeah, that's how I think about it. It’s not that I’m asking for people's souls literally and figuratively, but most of the time I'm just asking them for, like, 1500 dollars. I'm like, “Okay, you can pick the devil’s deal or for the low, low price of 500 dollars per hour (plus any additional incurred costs) I can give you a moment that you'll definitely remember for a long time.” And you still get to keep the rest of your life. For the most part. Sometimes people become changed beyond repair. It’s the price you must be willing to pay.

What would the moment be for you? In exchange for your life and soul?

CO: Silly question. There's only one type of moment…

EW: I don't know, it's either cumming or transformation and I can't tell which one it is.

CO: It's not just one cum, it's the best cum. But also probably God. Probably like obliterating your body. And God. And then you go to hell.

EW: And then hell-bound you are. It's funny because capitalist rhetoric around time is “time is a container.” Time marks a beginning and an end to a thing, time boxes in a thing. Money may function as the container for this time. But in reality, that moment of climax is very slippery.

CO: The other thing about that moment is actually experiencing it, as opposed to merely anticipating it. And re-experiencing it; there is potentially no end to it.

EW: Which is the third part of this equation, if we're thinking about James Turrell and his desire to create these containers for time and space: the body.

CO and EW: The body!

HUMBLED BY EMBODIMENT (DECAY)

EW: I gave a talk this year at Brown, about the archive and the ways in which we think about it from an institutional lens. I had very formative experiences working at an archival film, culture, and art museum in Austin. One of them included sitting under a fumigated hood for $11.25 an hour, and vacuuming mold off the papers of a very famous magician, or illusionist, as he liked to be called. I thought “This is so goddamn weird. They're just paying some fucking 19-year-old to do this.” These are the ways in which we publicly acknowledge documented histories. The archive aims to create all these containers, and to prevent decay. But the one thing that is missing is this very slippery, cute, sad, small thing of space and time, which is the body and the embodied experience.

CO: The embodied experience is eternally slipping away. It brings me back to the difficult question we both couldn’t answer: what does it feel like to be the vessel for these miracles?

EW: Sometimes it makes you feel very small. Does it not make you feel very small?

CO: I don’t know.

EW: The ways in which my domination style has progressed has made me very desirous of scenes in which I am just the orchestrator. Like we're fixing to go, barrelling, tumbling towards this moment. I'm the slightly bigger one because I'm doing all the work and doing all the action and have a plan. But also when I get there I feel so...diminished. Not in a bad way. But in a way where I am humbled by the intensity of the experience. And both parties are in it together. Both are submissive to this larger happening. The totality of the connection or the experience.

CO: I felt that way with you.

EW: I love God. Wait, in which way did you feel that way with me?

CO: Every time I whip you.

EW: Oh, yeah. That's very nice.

I felt that way about this man a long time ago. A special masochist. It was the first time that I ever started using plastic bags during sessions. So his head was in a plastic bag, and it was actually a great plastic bag because it was thick enough that he wouldn't breathe it in, but clear enough that I can still see his face. He was tied to this vintage gynecological chair, and I had his balls in a vice grip. For anybody who has never put another person's head in a plastic bag, you’d think they’d start suffocating immediately, but if the bag is capacious and they have big lungs, then it actually takes them a lot of time to move through all the oxygen in the bag. Anywho, his balls are in a vice grip, and I started squeezing and he let out these screams and moans that were just so – they were just so horrifying. And so Godly. So sublime. And I just felt this emptiness inside of me.

He's still out there, and we are soulmates within this container. I would have never met him in any other circumstance, but this connection that we have is so profound.

CO: Do you know how they used to time sex work back in the day?

EW: They would use those special candles and matches, right? They would light for fifteen minutes at a time.

CO: Another way of enclosing time – as technology changed, the way people contain time has changed.

EW: I've been thinking about decay a lot these days. I've always thought about death in my scenes, but I've been thinking a lot more about the question that you had, which is what comes after that moment? What happens after death? Filth. Disgust. Shit. Vomit. Cum! The gross and the abject are for me concrete evidence of death.

CO: I want you to talk about what you did to your recent client.

EW: Let's call him Krazy Straw, because that's his name these days. He just gets so excited and continually filled with these intense desires to go further and to turn himself into the central engine and ultimate receptacle in a larger system of waste.

It took us some time to develop what it was that he was specifically looking for, because first it was just a session where he was like, “Make me drink your pee and make me eat my own cum.” Classic things, you know, normal boy things. Then it became these more intricate scenarios: “Okay, now call three of your friends with you, let's do a gang bang and let's go ass to mouth and then I'm in bondage and it's inescapable and every time your friends need to pee you dump it into my mouth and make me the center of this piss system.” This “Pisstem.” He's literally an architect. He would draw these very rudimentary schema of how he wanted the systems to go and how he wanted the actors to be within that system. I would be the engineer: gathering all the people together, overseeing the production, making sure that I got funding, making sure that the scaffolding was up, eventually placing him at the center of these very confusing, overwhelming, and elaborate systems.

Our most recent session was very intense. We started at nine in the morning. Two other Dommes came in, and he was put in the middle of this suspension rig with a spanking bench, tied down, mouth held open with a gag. We all took turns, going fast and timing ourselves. We each spent five minutes going in these different permutations; first I was in his ass, and then I transferred my dick to his mouth, and then another one of the Dommes was in his ass while I was in his mouth, and then we would switch and etc. He calculated the number of permutations based on the number of Dommes that were there.

Five minutes and next and five minutes and next. We're fucking back and forth, back and forth. At a certain point, each of us in our various states of excitement decided that we needed to pee. We all put it into a bowl and then I milked him into the same bowl, so his cum was mixed in. We poured the mixture into an enema bag, filled up his butt –

[Cleo is audibly and rhythmically gasping]

Locked the enema bag. Snipped one end of it. So one end of the tube was in his ass. We put the other end in his mouth. Naturally, I made him suck the cum and piss mixture from his own butt.

CO: That is a feat of engineering!

EW: Thank you. I thought so too.

CO: When was the miracle?

EW: The miracle actually was when I walked him to the shower. I looked at him and said “You did really good today. I'm so proud of you.” I don't remember the exact specifics of his reply, but it was along the lines of “I mean this in such good faith when I say I could only ever do this with you. After all these years, I keep coming back to you for a reason.”

CO: It’s a rom-com. Rain is pouring. You've chased after each other in the airport. And it's like, it's you.

EW: It’s always been you.

CO: It’s always been you. So romantic.

EW: You put enough enemas in the right butts, someday you too can find the one.

ENGINEERING AFTERLIVES

CO: The nature of our work is that these moments are usually only transmitted through legend—passed down through people who know people. These moments die when people stop talking about them. How have you been thinking about archives for your miracles, your work?

EW: I take a lot of photos for sure. I've also wanted to be more creative with documentation, because the photo doesn't really give you the sense of what it was like to be there. Something that feels good to me is taking little bits of ephemera from people's bodies or little tokens from the session or the scene.

I'll tell you a story. I love New York and I think that in a lot of capacities, New York is very community-based, and very much about everybody else’s business, for better or worse, as opposed to Texas, where I encountered a very individualist way of being, where people keep to themselves. One of the ways in which this manifested for me was in the innate indulgence of driving a car. I did this elaborate scene in which I had this lover come down to visit me in Texas, and I wanted to show them the way that I felt about them, which was, as a person who is sometimes very recklessly careening in the vehicle of my own desire, when I go too hard or too far and eventually kill this helpless creature in the road (the object of my desire), that I will do my best to honor them and lay them to rest.

So I created this narrative over the course of several days. We did a brief road trip to West Texas, where we hiked up one of my favorite mountain ranges, the Fort Davis mountains. We climbed one of the peaks and ventured slightly off-path to sit on this rock jutting out of the cliff face. I laid them down on top of a cowhide, giving them a perfect view of the sunset, and I started stapling rabbit pelts to them. I used a scalpel to carve a line in their stomach about them being a creature sacrificed in the chaos of a head-on collision. I stapled all of the rabbit hide around the cuttings, so it looked like they were a creature that was covered in fur but their entrails were falling out, and that I had spilled their entrails onto the rabbit fur and cowhides. I've been thinking about the ways in which keeping these tokens or using these tokens to build altars can be a useful art-making practice; an alternative archive of what is left behind when these moments have slipped, or are experiencing a slippage of time.

CO: Reanimating the relics. Not because Saint Ursula is back. But because in touching St. Ursula's brain you experience God again. You experience a new miracle.

EW: Exactly. Not an attempt to create a perfect simulation, but to make a new miracle. To pull whatever vibrancy and energy that was created within that ritual into a new one.

—

Written by Cleo Ouyang @cleoouyang and Empress Wu @thebitchempress_

Photography by Toby Finke @tobyfinke

Production Assistant: Rena Li @renal.artery

Model: Emmy Lewis @missemilialewis

Cleo Ouyang is a Dominatrix and professional dream girl working between NYC and LA. Her main mediums are insatiable yearnings, psychological games, and devotional withdrawals from bank accounts. She is a co-founder of the art collective Veil Machine, and you can reach her at http://cleoouyang.com.

Empress Wu (all pronouns) is a Dominatrix and cultural activist practicing in NYC and beyond. Their work explores the performance of intimacy through digital landscapes, queer S&M, sexual labor, ancestral ritual, conflict, and more. Her work in all its forms has been seen at MoMA PS1, the Performa Biennial, Brown University, and probably a dungeon near you. She lives digitally at empresswu.net.

TO BE CONSUMED: Cleo Ouyang In Conversation With Empress Wu