Chaoying Rao (aka Femme Castratrice) is Glasgow-based visual artist, and whose creative practice explores the weaponisation of desire under patriarchy and western myth-making structures about the orient. Her research materialises in photography, live art, moving image, sculpture, and installation. She found herself working in strip clubs from the age of seventeen. It became the place where her movement and performance practice were born and, in the many years that followed, honed. It was the prompt for her interest in how power is negotiated through the body, through images of the body, and in the histories and legacies of racial fetishisation. Often using humour as a tool to disarm and charm the viewer, her work utilises the visual tropes of misogyny, abject femininity, and the grotesque to play with that fine line between attraction and repulsion.