Why Jet Li Didn’t Kiss Aaliyah

The Kiss That Wasn’t — David Choe on Race, Representation, and the Artist’s Struggle

00:00 Romeo Must Die — the kiss that never was
00:33 Asian faces in Hollywood history
01:08 Bruce Lee and breaking the mold
01:54 Stereotypes that still linger
03:39 Chasing happiness, fighting erasure
05:35 Wrapping up: joy, justice, and visibility

In this raw, unscripted monologue, artist David Choe interrogates the entangled narratives of race, masculinity, and media representation through the lens of personal reflection and cultural critique. Framed by the infamous final scene of Romeo Must Die—where a moment of intimacy between Jet Li and Aaliyah was erased—Choe exposes the persistent erasure and emasculation of Asian men in Western storytelling.

This video is less a rant and more a contemporary arte povera performance—where spoken word and autobiographical stream-of-consciousness transform into a living installation of cultural commentary. Drawing on figures like Bruce Lee, Chow Yun-Fat, Jim Lee, and his own disillusionments, Choe maps the liminal space Asian-American men occupy in the American imagination: visible, yet excluded; exceptional, yet desexualized; celebrated, yet peripheral.

Simultaneously, the piece evolves into an intimate confession of the artist’s own self-destructive tendencies, his flirtation with pain as performance, and his slow crawl toward joy. Painting and storytelling, for Choe, are not just artistic acts—they are survival rituals. Here, trauma and tenderness coexist.

This is outsider art by an insider. A refusal to perform respectability. A meditation on identity, denial, and the pursuit of peace. As with all of Choe’s work, expect discomfort, contradiction, and brutal honesty.

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