Li-Ming Hu describes herself as a ‘recovering actor’. A familiar face to viewers of Shortland Street in the early 2000s, she was also the writer of a number of episodes. Hu starred in Renee Liang’s first play, Lantern (2009), as well as in Roseanne Liang’s short film Take 3 (2007). Such experiences and accomplishments within the entertainment industry are palpable in her art practice, especially so in Boney (Phoney?) M (2020), recently presented at Dunedin Public Art Gallery.

Hu controls all facets of her works’ production—manic, maximalist inventions that exude humour, absurdity, abandon, and, equally, exasperation and rage at the racist, sexist and capitalist shit that keeps churning through the creative industries. In Boney (Phoney?) M, her own creative control contrasts with the exploitation of the band members’ identity and image. Boney M. came into being through German producer and singer Frank Farian’s appropriation of Jamaican ska. In the work’s first talking-head interview, Hu, as Liz Mitchell (one of the band’s four original members), explains, “Farian was Boney M. … but he didn’t know how to go out there and perform it, so he thought maybe if he got some black dancers ….” Of the initial band members—Mitchell, Bobby Farrell, Maizie Williams and Marcia Barrett—only Mitchell and Barrett, along with Farian himself, were deemed (by Farian) to have suitable voices. The outfit was hugely successful in Germany and other Western countries such as the United Kingdom and New Zealand, and even in the Soviet Union, but it never gained wide popularity in the US, nor, perhaps predictably, in the Caribbean countries from which the music it mimicked came.

While manufactured bands are not uncommon, Hu interrogates the power imbalances specific to Boney M.—between “who wrote, who sang, who looked the part and who got the credit.” Playing all four Caribbean members, plus the German producer of the disco-funk band, Hu tells their story using their own words, through careful study of interviews found on YouTube, and through recreating the music video for their hit single ‘Sunny’ (itself a cover originally written by American soul singer Bobby Hebb). Boney (Phoney?) M responds to the incongruity of a band manufactured to cater to a largely white, European consumer’s desire for a particular expression of blackness or racial identity. Hu parodies the band members, appropriating and exaggerating their mannerisms, much as they were asked to appropriate and exaggerate their own racial identity. Through this gesture, Hu’s performance pays tribute to their tenacity, acknowledging the exploitation of their race and image.

Hu frequently uses autobiography as a central element in her work, to dissect the entertainment industry’s obsession with image, authenticity and the impetus to perform more generally. In Three Interviews (2018), we see her smiling for the camera and answering questions for staged interviews, while a matter-of-fact voiceover relays behind-the-scenes information over the footage. Her practice often intertwines material derived from the production of her work with what seem to be autobiographical elements. Shots of her working in her studio, applying make-up and changing costumes, producing audition tapes and interviews, and the process of obtaining an artist’s work visa in the USA are all used to lay bare the mechanics of self and creative production.

While Boney (Phoney?) M is more like a second-person artist biography—or a maybe ghost-written autobiography—her concerns and strategies are the same. She talks and performs directly to the camera, establishing an unsettling closeness and an uncomfortable pull between the urge to laugh and concern for whoever is being parodied or picked apart. In the last scene of Boney (Phoney?) M, the performative smiles of each character are revealed to be just so; the sparkling, pop-music façade of dancing and singing comes to an end as the band walks off screen, money having rained down onto the white producer. (Who got the credit?)

The many overlapping ideas within her work and her ostentatious DIY aesthetic are some of the reasons I find Li-Ming Hu’s work so compelling. Beyond the pop music and humour, Boney (Phoney?) M is thematically and materially dense, exploring the complex and timely themes of cultural appropriation, racism and exploitative conditions of labour in an entertaining yet incisive tangle.