Ruonan Shen

Critical Review: Unleashing the Spectacle: Ruonan Shen’s Poetics of Drag and Domesticity

by Anna Gvozdeva

In Unleashing Feminine Charm, Ruonan Shen constructs a visual cosmos where gender is not fixed, but performed—an act of resistance and revelation. A London-based visual artist and photographer currently studying Interior Design at the University of the Arts London, Shen brings a spatial sensibility to her work that elevates her portraits beyond conventional drag documentation. Instead, they unfold as intricate visual performances that interrogate the roles we occupy—willingly or otherwise.

The series, set in domestic interiors, boudoirs, bedrooms, and cluttered dressing rooms, stages a contrast between theatrical femininity and mundane environments. In Housewife, for example, a drag performer lounges across a kitchen countertop in a sequined purple dress, exuding Old Hollywood glamour amid the fluorescent banalities of eggs, condiments, and plastic grocery bags. The tension is immediate and deliberate. By inserting high drag aesthetics into spaces associated with labor and confinement, Shen critiques heteronormative expectations while celebrating subversive beauty.

Ruonan Shen | Housewife

On Stage is equally commanding: a performer draped in electric pink organza explodes across a living room filled with personal memorabilia—lamps, jewelry, cultural relics. The subject commands attention like a deity in flight. The ruffled lotus-shaped bodice references traditional Chinese floral symbolism, while the gesture and scale harken back to the dramatic grandeur of Peking opera. In Shen’s lens, femininity is not fragile—it’s spectacular, defiant, and meticulously curated.

Ruonan Shen | On Stage

Throughout the project, Shen resists easy binaries. Under the Spotlight situates a drag queen atop a bed, mouth open, eyes wild, limbs languid. The backdrop is chaotic—costumes strewn, wigs displaced, makeup scattered. Yet within this entropy, the subject radiates control, intention, and agency. This calculated mess underscores the labor behind performance and destabilizes the illusion of effortless beauty.

Ruonan Shen | Under the Spotlight

In perhaps the most audacious image, Drama Queen, a figure in a blood-red ruffled gown with a towering yellow wig snarls at the camera, posed amid a rack of pastel gowns. Here, Shen revels in parody and menace—a campy scream that challenges drag’s commodification and reclaims its punk roots. The subject becomes monstrous and magnificent, collapsing the boundary between performer and character.

Ruonan Shen | Drama Queen

Shen’s approach draws from minimal aesthetics but indulges in maximalist emotion. The artist’s staging is meticulous, her lighting artificial and stylized, evoking a sense of surreal tension. These images do not aim for realism; they reconstruct reality on the subjects’ terms. “Photography,” Shen writes, “is not documentation, but reconstruction.” Each frame becomes a quiet rebellion—against societal expectation, against invisibility.

At the conceptual heart of the project is the quote attributed to Wu Zetian: “If you put a man in a woman’s position, he will become a woman.” Shen does not interpret this as literal transformation through costume, but rather as a provocation: what would happen if power, vulnerability, and care were truly universal? In portraying drag not as illusion but as incarnation, Shen illuminates femininity as an expansive, political, and deeply human space.

In a cultural context where Chinese drag remains both emerging and precarious, Shen’s work is not merely celebratory—it’s necessary. By centering the subjectivity of her performers and rendering them with dignity, sensuality, and theatrical wit, Ruonan Shen contributes to an urgent visual archive of queerness in transformation.