Nymphia Wind Breathes New Life into Centuries of Asian Drag

This article contains spoilers for Season 16 of “RuPaul’s Drag Race.”

At long last, the reality TV competition “RuPaul’s Drag Race” has crowned its first East Asian winner: Nymphia Wind, the Taiwanese drag queen, otherwise known as fashion designer Leo Tsao. Nicknamed “Banana Buddha” for her love of the color yellow and known for both designing and sewing her stunning drag looks, Wind’s victory sparked celebrations in her native country and earned the congratulations of Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen herself.

But Wind’s win carries more meaning than simply putting East Asians on the American screen or providing visibility for the LGBTQ Taiwanese community. The victory also validates the drag queen’s use of drag to reinvent and amplify Asian history, especially that of Chinese opera: An art of cross-gender performance, intricate visual symbolism, and distinctive song and dance, with depths that are rarely explored — if at all represented — in Western media.

Wind is not the first to use fashion to reconnect with history. Take the Hanfu Movement, in which Chinese people stroll about the streets clad in the styles of centuries-old dynasties originated by the Han ethnic group. (The majority of both China and Taiwan’s populations are Han, their unique cultures having developed out of a shared history.) While a call to beautiful ancient aesthetics, most hanfu pale in creativity and nuance compared to Nymphia Wind’s original designs, which take advantage of drag to subvert and adapt history instead.

Unlike other fashion spaces, the drag runway makes everything bigger and bolder, as a fundamental premise is that things are not as they seem. Wind’s looks are riotous, elegant confections — her bubble tea cape offers playful homage to the beloved Taiwanese drink while her lucky knot dominatrix bodysuit deconstructs staples of Chinese decor. In doing so, Wind takes a hammer to how well-intentioned Americans often expect to treat unfamiliar cultures: With passive respect and a touch of fear regarding cultural appropriation.

Wind doesn’t treat culture like a monument — she highlights popular aspects of Taiwanese life, presenting it as evolving, accessible, and fun. Wind’s more traditional looks, however, are both respectful and revolutionary. This includes outfits modeled after the costumes of Peking opera (also known as “guoju” or “national opera” in Taiwan), which were developed in Beijing in the 18th century. Unlike bubble tea or lucky knots, Americans will not encounter Peking opera during a simple trip to Chinatown. Drag offers an ingenious setting to introduce Americans to the form, with its stylized aesthetics, elaborate face paint, high-pitched singing, and symbolic acrobatic movements — characteristics that it shares with drag.

The resemblance doesn’t stop there; Wind’s drag opera costumes closely resemble the real thing. This aesthetic duplication is deceptively innovative, highlighting the inherent visual exaggeration of Peking opera. Fans of drag don’t need to understand Asian symbolism to enjoy the dramatic beauty of the designs. By remaining faithful to her inspiration, Wind seems to claim that Peking opera is just another form of drag.

This claim is all the more meaningful when taking into account the opera’s history. One could say that Nymphia Wind is actually the newest addition to a long line of proto-drag queens; in the infancy of Peking opera, Dan (female) roles were played by men because female performers were decreed immoral and banned from taking the stage. Today, Wind transforms a patriarchal tradition into queer ownership of cross-gender performance. In her water sleeve dance to traditional opera music, an ornamental phoenix perches on Wind’s head, crowning her with the symbol of femininity dominant in East Asian mythology.

Wind’s finale performance also infuses Peking opera with androgyny, as she plays a tiger-masked general who transforms into the “Queen of Wind.” The “Five Tiger Generals” is a Chinese phrase used to refer to a given lord’s five top military commanders, while another Tiger General is the main male role in the opera “Slaying the Tiger General,” featuring unwilling fiancée Fei Zhen’e’s stabbing of him and then herself. Another inspiration might be Feng Po Po, an elderly wind goddess whose steed of choice is actually a tiger.

These characters are hardly cultural icons, even for the Han diaspora. Wind resurrects niche parts of Han culture, transforming male warriors into resilient women and old madames into glamorous queens in the process. As she pulls off an imperial robe to reveal a modern sparkly bodysuit — still with the operatic touch of water sleeves — she uses historically masculine power to empower femininity. But this transformation would not be possible without the expectation-defying women of the source tradition. Through drag, Wind invites examination of the unorthodox presentations of gender in the deep archives and hidden crannies of Asian storytelling.

Some may view Wind’s looks as a bastardization of cultural art usually taken seriously. But in a society where traditional garb and spiritual charms are mass-produced and nobody bats an eye, this is in fact an exemplar of the revitalizing ways in which Asians incorporate ancient culture into their modern lives. Nowhere is this cultural reinvention more exciting than drag, a space where the capacity for the audacious fosters incredible creative invention.

Just like her signature color, Wind’s fashion is saturated with past and present meaning. As a bright hue in banana-inspired costumes, yellow cheekily reclaims its offensive racial connotations to promote Asian pride. As an opera robe color, yellow signals that Wind is royalty, and an utterly new kind in the Asian theater world at that: A drag queen. Nymphia Wind is the iconic heir of the Han theatrical tradition and a pioneer not just of “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” but of Asian art at large.

—Staff writer Isabelle A. Lu can be reached at isabelle.lu@thecrimson.com.