FUNERAL

After three years of being out in the world, Funeral is having a funeral

After having found a quiet sarcophagus in Kernpunkt Press for three years, Funeral’s soul is wandering the afterlife and seeks to find a place to rest. In the future, Funeral will have an exhumation event. Many thanks to Jesi Bender for believing in this manuscript and for supporting experimental writing throughout the years.

Cover design: Gami Nakano

Description

Written using prose, images, lists, diagrams, songs, and plays, the novella Funeral follows Eddie from the 1969 film Funeral Parade of Roses in her descent to Hell. In Hell, Eddie meets and falls in love with Madame Rose during lunch. They spend their days creating Hell’s first boba shop and cheering on Hell in the final pingpong match against Heaven, but their relationship soon falls apart. When Xing returns home to Shanghai via Hell’s bullet train, Eddie sets out on a journey to win her back, accompanied by her friends Tony Leung, the god Tu’Er Shen, the moon, Mary Poppins, and her over-talkative Uber driver, Jimin Park. In this co-authored novella, DAISUKE SHEN & VI KHI NAO explore the depths of morality, pain, and queerness with irreverent humor and unflinching honesty.

Artist Reflection (originally published in De-Canon)

Vi wanted to watch a queer Asian film, but was limited in her Criterionness in Boulder. Daisuke was trying to trans-characterize the ethos of queerasianness. And, it was Fall and the leaves were turning yellow and red and time was imminent and Daisuke wrote their sections while gazing out at the two unused barbeque grills outside of their window in Brooklyn. Eventually, Daisuke gave Vi access to the Criterion landscape through the-beast-must-be-killed password, which led them to watching Funeral Parade of Roses. Vi commented on the exquisiteness of the main character Eddie’s non-gendered buttcheeks and the book came together within a short period of approximately three months? Their intention was to write the continuation of Eddie’s life while preserving the nakedness of the dried tofu after it wore really sexy Chinese underwear. Eventually, they ended up writing the continuation of many peoples’ lives, including Tony Leung. They both wrote when their car’s literary headlights were mostly turned off, and the view of the nocturnal landscape of the narration was ambushed with intermittent darkness. They were compelled by the unknown, not only of the materiality of the language but also the materiality of its direction. There was a lot of trust. Vi trusted that Daisuke would take them to a literary place that had not been explored, and they would not leave Vi in the mountains without any beef jerky, jackfruit chips, or coconut water. Due to the intensity of the process’ unknownness, Daisuke and Vi’s book unfolded organically without boxing gloves or TESticuLAr wheels. Its hybridity was born from biomorphing the quotidian exchanges between Vi and Daisuke, and ecologicizing the texture of their existence into the manuscript so that both worlds (fiction and poetry / photography and numbers) did not feel isolated or cannibalized in their contemporary diction and medium.

Merchandise

Artist: dreamcarp69

Although Funeral defies comparison, I’m reminded of the Sōseki’s Ten Nights of Dreams, with its Orphic quality, of Acker’s parodic cut-ups, and of such avant-garde culture grinders as Donald Duk by Frank Chin and Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. But that’s all to say that, if Vi Khi Nao and Daisuke Shen were boxers, they’d be heavyweights. Using a cult classic film as their template, the authors have dug so deep into the bones of Sophoclean tragedy that they’ve propelled themselves into a symbolic language of the distant future. Hell is eternal, but it seems to be forever changing. Acquire this map or be lost forever.

— Conor Hultman for Southwest Review: Semiotics for the Global Damned

​REVIEWS | INTERVIEWS | REFLECTION

Review: Independent Book Review - 30 Books To Look Out For In Early 2023

Interview: Las Vegas Review Journal - A Solitude Of Two

Interview: The Rumpus: B.R. Yeager - A Conversation W/ Daisuke Shen & Vi Khi Nao About Their Collaborative Novella, Funeral

Excerpt: Being Able to Distinguish Isolation from Despair - Fonograf

FILM

Funeral - short film

Like two dreams of the underworld playing exquisite corpse with each other. And Tony Leung is in it. - Sebastian Castillo

I read this and immediately wanted to riot in the streets, by virtue of how good it was. I also learned a lot of facts about public figures like Awkwafina and Michelle Obama. - Jesi Gaston

This book brings out my ego because I tear up and/or giggle while reading it, feeling like it was written just for me. The film Funeral Parade of Roses—the story that Funeral continues—is an urban retelling, but all the trappings of stylization aren’t there: there’s no enforced grittiness; the lights are very bright, the blood flowing very freshly. This book by D[aisuke] and V[i] captures the same approach: materials do not shield or dictate shape, they stagger and drape. Sometimes in the movement a secret color flickers. But more than just sensory development, an inexorable sequence of events. More than an allegory or satire or retelling, more like documentation of being entrenched in the universe and all the gossipy deadpan jokes to be made while trying to love sweetly in the face of cruelty’s differentiation. When everything feels impossible, maybe you have mistakenly presumed ethereality. D[aisuke] and V[i] show that what animates aftermath is without boundaries. - Ginger Ko

Zine

The Void is the Boundary between Heaven and Earth