Florida-born, Brooklyn-based artist Kalup Linzy casts Michael Stipe and Leo Fitzpatrick as his co-stars in the tragi-camp world of the fictional Braswell family in his newest feat, Conversations wit de Churen X: One Life to Heal. The video revisits characters that Linzy has been working with for over a decade in acclaimed soap opera-inspired films such as All My Churen (2003). From overbearing mama to wayward son, Linzy plays nearly every character in his draggy world of high drama, song and dance, where disturbing effects such as voice modifiers give foreboding electronic depth to the Braswells' skewed universe. Though a celebrated figure in the art world, with work housed in MoMA’s permanent collection among others, Linzy's engagement with the vocabulary of daytime television runs surprisingly deep. He has crossed into more popular forms, appearing in episodes of soap General Hospital during the same period in which his sometime collaborator James Franco infamously guest-starred. While here Linzy follows the disappearance of a camp chanteuse named Taiwan from a cruise ship, leaving us with her body slumped on the shore, this weekend at Art Basel Hong Kong fair the artist will reincarnate his tragic diva at a dinner for art-world luminaries organized by Yana Peel, held on an old boat decorated in the style of 1930s Shanghai.