This event will be held at AWAKE / B1F Kabukicho Daikan Plaza Seiza-kan, 1-2-7 Kabukicho, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo

Unveiling the Secrets of the Night: Fancy Fantasy! Club Welcomes You to a Night of Fantasies and Desires

Night, the light transforms like a dream, different from the day.
Here, in this time capsule, we gradually remove our masks,
immersed in the play of light where time seems to stand still.
Our thoughts shift inward, exploring life, love, and hidden secrets.

When the dawn breaks, you'll still remember the secrets we share,
the temptations that belong to the night..

Fancy Fantasy! is a project by Taipei-based artist Yu Cheng-Ta, featuring a music video and a pop-up host club that will open for three days only. Staged in Kabukicho, a commercial pleasure district swirling with desire for money and sex, the pop-up host club* invites visitors into a promiscuous zone of contact where changing bodies and personas intersect. The project casts celebratory light on queering romance in love relationships beyond the heteronormative conventions in the entertainment industry.

Beneath the electric hum of neon, in the basement of a vintage multi-tenant building, the blue-lit, aquarium-like Fancy Fantasy! Club pulsates with irresistible allure. Professional hosts, servicing under their chosen names, will be joined by club artists, musicians and dancers who embody the personas they desire through performance and story-telling. Through a concerted and spontaneous series of participatory interventions, involving the stage performers and audiences alike, Fancy Fantasy! aims to ignite creativity and exploration, bonding Tokyo’s cultural community to engage in social and critical experience.

The figure that hosts Fancy Fantasy! Club is FAMEME, an influencer, singer and a business person who founded the Durian Museum to promote his family's durian farming business, now venturing into the product development of durian perfume. As FAMEME is an alter ego of the artist himself, the blurring of boundaries between the physical and the imagined is central to Yu’s practice, reinforcing his thematic exploration of constructed realities. As materialisation of such imagineering, the project combines the spatial assemble of fictionalised characters with the fabrication of mock ads in advertorial style of Kabukicho, Otoko-bon (host menu) and derivative FAMEME-labeled merchandise.

During the 3-night event, the project will also premiere the music video Fancy Fantasy! (2024, music composed by Yuka O., lyrics by Maki Tezuka, video by Matheus Katayama), which, inspired by Boy’s Love cliches, dramatizes the same-sex exuberance that emerges from a host club encounter. Along the paradoxical and memorable phrase of the song—”I am good at making the beginning of the end”—a young salaryman awkwardly enters the club to find his female friends celebrating the birthday who are being entertained by the club’s the No. 1 host. As a seasoned entertainer, the host warmly welcomes the man to gradually shed his emotional armor. The champagne call, a contemporary ritual of temporal social bonding, intensifies the incidental moment of love. The lights cast an enticing glow over their bodies, swaying to a seductive mix of bass and electrifying beats.

In Fancy Fantasy! , market-oriented pseudo-romance is maneuvered through queering relationship norms, while multiple layers of reality and fiction channel energy and desire that defy divisive gender categories. Glamoured with camp humor, Yu's mockumentary approach to "life theater" prompts audiences to explore the intricacies of self-presentation and restrictive conventions they may have in daily life. During the course of the events, the club will transform into a kaleidoscope of fantasy and liberation, where multiple identities merge in a celebration of queer romance. Fancy Fantasy! will provide a safe space for all visitors, whose desires and fantasies will take part of the collective unveiling the secrets of the night.

Yu Cheng-Ta (b.1983)

Yu Cheng-Ta is a performance and multimedia artist hailing from Taiwan. His work consistently delves into the intersections of identity, language, politics, cultural amalgamation, and media interfaces. Through whimsical performances, he navigates the ever-evolving realm of contemporary media to examine the metamorphosis of “'self”' and “'identity.”' Since 2017, he has ventured into exploring the performative aspects of gender, contemplating both individual and collective identity, as well as the pivotal political role played by queer imagination within a media-dominated society through his event-based projects. He also formed a duo called “Watermelon Sisters” with Singaporean artist Ming Wong. In 2019, he created a fictional character known as 'FAMEME,' employing a dual identity as the cornerstone for his cross-disciplinary art practice.

Yu participated in many international art festivals, including: Taipei Biennial, Venice Biennale Taiwan Pavilion, Aichi Triennale, Performa Biennial, Shanghai Biennial, Berlin International Film Festival, Asian Art Biennial, among others. Also, he held solo screenings at Centre Pompidou in Paris and Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen, as well as solo exhibitions at Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts and Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art.