My art aims to demonstrate a new kind of male gaze with the theories of gender fluidity and performativity, mimetic fantasy, and the blurring of the boundaries between the object and the subject in the gaze, in which the male voyeur becomes the female the subject through the act of fantasy and imagination. The art draws upon examples of the female nude throughout art history and utilize the concept of the “onnagata” in Japanese Kabuki theatre, in which androgynous men assume the role of femininity. In short, I depict myself as a woman through an artistic approach based on the history of the female nude and my vision of an ideal female body that I envision for myself. As discussed by Laura Mulvey (1975), the male gaze is the process of looking at females by the spectator through the masculine, heterosexual viewpoint. Within the male gaze, the female becomes the passive sexual object of the gaze and cannot be a protagonist or the subject because her importance lies in her being props to the male heroism. But I assert that the male gaze can also become the female subject within a mimetic fantasy. The male viewer identifies with the female as a protagonist of the mimetic fantasy. As discussed by Aristotle, mimesis is a means through which people imitate and simulate the behaviors and the images of the people, things, and phenomena. Through the act of mimetic fantasy, I can replicate and become the female figure as a subject in my work. Through this new kind of male gaze, I become the female subject and portray myself as a female in my art as a performance. Where does the concept of myself as a woman originate? Why do I choose to depict myself as having big breasts? And what does this mean in terms of the male gaze? Is there something about beauty that people see as a problem today? Should a female nude from the past be called objectification or sexist? Is it possible today to depict and paint a nude woman without objectifying her? These are some of the questions that I hope to answer in my art. Gender is fluid because it is on a spectrum and based on performance. The male observer can perform the female role through mimetic fantasy and supplement the mimetic fantasy with cross-dressing, as in Japanese kabuki theatre. Painting can be an image-based performance; while the performance does not happen in the physical reality, it occurs in the image and the act of painting. Through the act of painting, which I liken to plastic surgery and putting on makeup, I perform my vision of femininity like the onnagata in Japanese kabuki theatre. Michael Tuassig's (2018) research into mimesis shows that the process of mimesis blurs the boundaries between the subject and the object because the subject can appropriate the qualities of the "object" through imitation. The subject of the male gaze can also appropriate the feminine qualities from the images of female objects, and the passive subject-ness and the active object-ness of the male viewer and the female figure can cross over to each other. The subject who is a passive viewer becomes the object, and the figure who is active on screen becomes the subject through mimesis. As a boy, I grew up in a highly patriarchal society of South Korea and had a very narrow and ignorant, stereotypical understanding of girls as having a delicate nature. Society imposed on me a limited and fixed stereotypical image of boys as being tough. While I aspired to be this kind of masculine image, a part of me wished to experience and express a delicate and feminine nature of me that was forbidden. I want to make art to explore this topic involving my desire to become a female gender.