AustLit

Look Who's Morphing is a collection of bizarre, funny, often menacing stories in which, along with his extended family, the central character undergoes a series of transformations, shape-shifting through figures drawn from film and television, music clips and video games, porn flicks and comics. He is Godzilla, a Muppet, and Whitney Houston's bodyguard; the Fonz, a robot, a Ford Bronco 4x4 - and, as a climax, a Gulliver-sized cock rock singer, played upon by an adoring troupe of sexy Lilliputians in short skirts and sailor suits and cheerleader outfits. Within these fantasies there is a deep intellectual and emotional engagement, a fundamental questioning of the nature of identity, and the way it constructs itself in a world dominated by the images of popular culture. – From the publisher's website.

In this 'interview,' Cho responds to diverse prompts and discusses topics including the writing process, mixing signals, and gender.

'This project's creative component is "Look Who's Morphing", a fiction collection that explores the theme of personal identity. The exegesis analyses an issue pertaining to the writer's creative process: what degree of directness was employed in the authorial identity in his creative work and how was this level of directness realised?' (Source: NLA.)

Discussing his approach to writing the stories in Look Who's Morphing, Cho writes in this essay: 'I am not very interested in examining my engagement with popular culture in terms of popular cultural "references" or "allusions." In fact, rather than focusing on the insertion of popular cultural references in my collection, what especially strikes me about this collection is the literal insertion of my self into the text: in a range of stories from my collection, I appear in various "universes" derived from popular cultural texts/canons. [....] I am especially interested in examining the very act by which the writer enters the text, and the dynamics this act creates between writer and text.' The essay goes on to discuss 'this textual self-insertion as a method of describing my self (which includes my Asian-Australianness).'