Malek Chebel talks to Nicole Albert and Lydia Ruprecht about gender questions in Islam: androgyny, homosexuality, and relations between the sexes in traditional and changing Muslim societies.

In 2002, at the Shanghai Biennale, which she attended to publicize French artists’ work, the gallery-owner Anne Lettrée was fascinated to discover the vitality of young Chinese artists. Since that date she has made around ten trips to the People's Republic and set up contacts with more than 150 artists from all disciplines (painters, sculptors, photographers, etc.)

Her meeting with Ma Liuming, who lives in Beijing and whose early work dates back 15 years or so, resulted in a show in Paris, in the Anne Lettrée gallery, in 2003. With the title ‘Corps de Chine - Acte I’ it was the start of a series of events around gender and sexuality - or sexing - themes that are at the same time central and concealed in Chinese civilization.

Fellini attempted to be painter, poet and musician in making Satyricon, a ‘free adaptation of Petronius's classic’, as the subtitle indicates. The film can be divided into three parts. The central section of the triptych is devoted to a hermaphrodite character. This figure, borrowed from Ovid, is the incandescent heart of the film, in which very many types of the dual and ambiguity are required to embody all the varieties of love and death. Hermaphroditus sums up the poetic, plastic and philosophical intentions carried by these figures. He also draws the shadow of their strange silhouette towards a proto-Christian horizon, which the film's three-part construction sets out to reveal.