The occidental ideal of beauty dominates the significant international catwalks and fashion markets that dictate the trends, which consequently impacts the choice of faces for the cover pages of fashion-, sport/ health magazines, and for TV adds and billboards alike. In the US, white male models are more likely to be booked for a photo shoot than the African-American or the Asian-American, who – according to the fashion photographer Howard Huang, who’s been in the fashion business over 20 years, were not that popular until recently. The so much desired image of “the guy next door” is white in the mind of an average American, which is a paradox considering that there are countless nations and races living and working together all across the United States.

“The Ugly Model ” is screening at Cinemasia Film Festival

Doris Yeung’s documentary “Ugly Model” is focused on Kevin Kreider, an Asian-American fitness model and a professional fitness coach who is trying to answer the question if Asian men can be sexy. As obscure as it sounds seeing a very handsome, muscular man with a great sense of taste in clothing and good manners, Kevin is still not sure if he can ever meet the beauty ideal of the American society, and it’s the burden, tightly connected to his Asian origins and the unequal treatment or races, he’s been carrying around all his life. His life goal is to become the first Asian-American man to land the front cover of the “Men’s Fitness magazine”.

The film opens with home videos, showing Kevin as a little boy freshly adopted from Korea. Voicing over the introduction to his portrait, he is talking about his earliest childhood memories, including kids who would make slanted eyes and call him a Chink. But no matter how much discrimination he faced while growing up, Kevin had never approached his adoptive parents to seek comfort, leaving them pretty much unaware of his inner hurt. Torn between his looks and the only country he knew as his home, he was hoping that the bullying will disappear one day if he stack around people long enough.

As an adult with a successful career of a fitness trainer/ model, Kevin is still plagued by insecurities as he is more and more convinced that every obstacle on his way to success is of racial nature, and that even Asian women prefer white men. His “ideal” matches picked up by Tinder turn into one-off dates, as they pretty much end up in catastrophes every time.

On her quest to the ultimate answer in “The Ugly Model”, Doris Yeung got stuck between the intended research, and her subject’s psychological suit. By coming to close to Kevin Kreider, she might have done a mistake of distracting the focus from the question of perceived attractiveness of Asian men to his very personal issues. Kevin Kreider is not just a young man with understandable herzschmerz surrounding a different treatment he was served since the young age, he is a complex personality, a taker with an explosive temperament, an image that doesn’t do him a favor, and certainly not the rest of the Asian community in America. Friends and girlfriends get discarded the moment they behave in a way he finds unfitting, his vanity and obsessiveness about his public image on social networks are immense, but also, blessed with looks and a good portion of success, Kevin Kreider can’t stand for an average Asian-American man.

This is also the case with other prominent Asian-Americans such as the BA player Jeremy Lin, the actor/ producer Brian Yang or the successful fashion model Daniel Liu whose advice Kevin is asking.