How did your interest in art begin and how did you get to where you are focused now?
I say this so much but I’ve been incredibly lucky to have met so many rad, encouraging, talented, friends along the way who’ve shown me what’s possible in both art-making and literally all other aspects of life that have influenced me so much. I never had schools I wanted to go to. Neither of my parents went to college. I grew up watching YouTube lyrics videos on the family computer, watching Saturday morning cartoons with my little brother, and stealing sesame balls from Chinese buffets with my mom. These are very much the things that I still think about.
I currently teach in the painting department at Kansas City Art Institute which is hilarious but so much fun because I was the most scared undergraduate student (I changed my major to Sculpture halfway through my sophomore year in a traumatic panic that was honestly one of the best decisions of my life), and now I get to yell encouragement at all my students.
You work within a variety of mediums, spanning from sculpture, video, performance, writing and so on. How do these varying mediums inform each other and push you in your practice?
I’m drawn to materials that don’t always last. Things that are quick like duct tape. Things lying around that end up fitting perfectly inside of each other. I get frustrated with singular objects or images failing to hold everything. When my mom died, I wasn’t satisfied with making austere things and sitting in grief. For me, it felt like screaming, like really orchestral. I wanted to run through an obstacle course and prove myself, my strength, my weight, my celebration, my aliveness. That required a lot of parts and a lot of learning. I often revisit and rework projects, give stories different endings, and presuppose scenarios into new formats. I think about how diaspora is an obstacle course and not a singular object. It implies a visual language of a lived identity that doesn’t need to be proved. Moving between materials makes sense with this.
I wanted more activation than just me doing or making something cool. Performance made sense because I was the activation in the work. Something pushing really hard besides something quiet. I get caught up in that. I’ve played with subtitles in place of like a voiceover in a video, or a rambling poem as a video embedded inside an object, instead of just writing it on its surface.
Where does myth making sit within your practice? How does this play into themes of growing up and digging in familial and personal pasts?
Okay, this is a really long-winded answer, but I’ve been trying to figure out what performance even really does in my work, and how it’s more about performativity itself. Like how that’s the actual vehicle for simulation.
I think photographs do this. Also, iPhone videos, karaoke, souvenirs and toys. So rather than a physical obstacle course, the recreation of that memory is like a reenactment. The copy can never be exactly the same right? The photo can never portray the same warmth as the moment it was taken. This slippage is the myth. In a performative context, we’re always reenacting something (habit, social comport, survival, etc.). I would dare say that all of art is performative because it represents something. I’m interested in how this relates to intergenerational memory and bouncing back and forth through time. I repeat the longings of my mother in a body that also mimics hers. How do I continue to follow the cycles of my mothers before, and how do I diverge from that path? The divergence is the moment the myth is created because a new thing is proposed into existence. It’s kind of like a glitch in biographical narrative to deviate, or reinvent. A distortion. I don’t know. This is really funny to me.
Even in historical reenactments, or theater, the moment has to hold the content or story, then it’s gone. Myth-making for me is very simply reinventing these fictions through scenarios (video, object, “performance”, mixtures of these, etc.).
Describe your current studio or workspace. (Please provide a photo of it if you have one)
I share a studio with my partner at Holsum Studios in Kansas City. He was recently living elsewhere for a semester teaching and I totally took it over. It definitely felt indulgent in the beginning because it’s so huge but having lived in Brooklyn I realized I needed to take advantage of the opportunity and it’s already spilling into the halls.
What is one of the bigger challenges you and/or other makers are struggling with these days and how do you see it developing?
I struggle with pressuring myself to be more productive even though I do keep myself busy. Just living day to day is exhausting and while graduate school gave me the time and space to experiment and complete an insane amount of work in a couple weeks, that was all I had to focus on. Sometimes it feels like there’s a sour layer of competition because everyone is applying for the same opportunities, and scrolling online and DMing your friend about something you hate or love. The past few years have taught me a lot about my capacity for taking things on, but literally just hanging with friends is okay! Slowness is okay! Weirdo experiments are cool and fun.
A lot of your sculpture focuses on performance and collaboration. What is a performative sculpture? What is your experience with collaboration and how does it inform the way you make? What do you love most about collaboration?
I kind of just smash the words performative and sculpture together. My earliest performances were conceived from making crazy sculptures and wanting to just cut them open and crawl inside so they could be costumes– this goes back to wanting to activate objects more.
As for collaborations, it’s just really fun making things with friends! Most of my collaborations came from just talking to people and being like ‘wow wouldn’t it be cool if we did this?’. The best thing is really meeting people who love or hate the same things as you. I met my good friend Jordan Wong, an experimental animator, at a residency and we’re just really great texting friends–like for daily life venting about politics, drama, art, and anything that happens to us. After a while we realized our work has a lot of overlaps and got excited about putting something together. A new mix of skills, materials, and methods, creates work that couldn’t have existed without staying up late riffing on an idea, or agreeing that the show Supernatural actually is gay.
With wonky forms, surreal installations, and comical performances, how do you use humor in your work to touch on more complicated ideas and themes?
Hmm I think humor is such a complex thing that can develop over time, or hold a ton of weight in a single moment. That heaviness carries a lot. Getting to the point in a roundabout way can make it more interesting and ridiculous. But also, I kind of think most things that happen to me are hilarious.
One time my brother asked me if I remembered ‘shalom bao’ (instead of xiao long bao), and I think about that a lot. Literally the best joke. But again it’s like, what is lost through the generations of language becoming smushed into other words…my mom stopped speaking Chinese when she came to America. Growing up, she would point to things and say she didn’t know what they were called ‘in English’, even though it’s the only language she spoke my entire life.
What are the main motifs in your work?
Screenshots, dogs, lyrics, finger-drawn hearts, pictures of my family eating, palaces.
What are some recent, upcoming or current projects you are working on?
I have a few group shows coming up this fall as well as a two-person show with my friend Walker Walls Tarver at Gallery Mouse in Detroit in October. I’ve been trying to work on some smaller pieces playing with image transfers and LED lights. A lot of weird digital collages for prints and shirts of inside jokes for like one person.
In the background, I’m working on a deconstructed documentary of my mom’s and aunt’s life when they immigrated to the SF Bay area in the 70s. Through footage I took with my aunt and brother on a recent trip to the Bay area, I want to compile a narrative that I’m just recently learning more about. Like anyone trying to find themselves, the stories are so emotional but also extremely free and fun. I’m working on the transcription and it’s the craziest stories told by my aunt, but also a lot of her, my brother, and I arguing about how to spell words because a lot was recorded over games of Scrabble. I want to create accompanying sculptures relating to locations of their life like the Seven Wonders of the World. I feel very protective of how this is perceived because I’m so adverse to a generalized interpretation of an ‘immigration story’. I just bought a jewelers saw so that’s exciting.
What do you want a viewer to walk away with after seeing your work?
Laughing, crying, maybe remembering something.
What do you collect?
I’m annoyingly sentimental with things so I subconsciously collect little trinkets, photographs, toys, scanned passages from books (I even have printed essays from undergrad that I didn’t understand at the time but like to revisit and actually now understand why it was assigned).
What have you been listening to/reading lately?
I’m trying to win another logo glass from my public library’s summer reading program so I have been on a fiction kick. I recently read and loved The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa, The Biography of X by Catherine Lacey, and The Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang. I’m not sure if these all being poetic dystopian novels is a coincidence or not.
Interview conducted and edited by Lily Szymanski