Fake Love & Institutional Longing (BTS) (2025-) is an institutional poetics project that explores the recursive, shape shifting machine of Orientalism through the archive of the Royal Asiatic Society alongside encounters in arts, life, K-pop, choreography, and dreams, propelled by epistemic desire.
The textual poetry threads the atmosphere of institutions, tracing where historical records of Orientalist imaginaries interface with contemporary upheaval and geo-political lie making. It documents the gentle microclimates of communication and incremental clerical intimacy with the Society’s archivist; a Scheherazade-like act of prolonging life within the gaps of the institutional frame.
The title draws on the 2018 BTS (방탄소년단 ) song ‘Fake Love’—a double entendre evoking self-effacement in love and the literal (in English) 'behind-the-scenes' (bts) systems of institutionalised labour. This extends to a leitmotif of K-pop choreography, which I enlist to explore inner feelings of epistemic desire and horror through the coded social choreography of institutions. These shifting feelings enact what Roland Barthes calls choreographic ‘figures’ in A Lover’s Discourse (1970): ‘a lunatic sport.’ A sport I unravel as a ‘sweaty concept’ in Sara Ahmed’s terms that embody the internally sweaty labour of trying to rouse and reconfigure new ways of knowing the violence erased and amalgamated within institutional ‘grids of intelligibility’ (Stoler).