GIRLS 17

GIRLS MAGAZINE

THE FLOATING WORLD

VOLUME 3, ISSUE 1, MAY 2023

GIRLS MAGAZINE THE FLOATING WORLD

Letter from the Editor | Page 3

Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander | Page 4

Dawn Chan | Page 9

JiaJia Fei | Page 15

Vanessa Holyoak | Page 20

Melissa Wang | Page 26 GIRLS

GIRLS MISSION STATEMENT

GIRLS is a revised portfolio of interviews from a nationwide community of real, strong womxn. It's a magazine that is 100% all womxn, which is beautiful in its rarity - the magazine is a safe space FOR womxn ABOUT womxn. Created by Adrianne Ramsey, it serves as a content destination for multigenerational womxn. Read on for an engagement of feminist voices and a collaborative community for independent girls to discover, share, and connect. The usage of the terms "girls" and "womxn" refers to gender-expansive people (cis girls, trans girls, non-binary, non-conforming, gender queer, femme centered, and any girlidentified person).

Front and Back Cover Image: Vanessa Holyoak in collaboration with Antoine Chesnais, Souvenir H1817, 2023 (work-in-progress)

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

BY ADRIANNE RAMSEY

Ukiyo is a Japanese term used to describe the urban culture of the Edo period in Japan (16001867); its English translation is “the floating world.” I first heard of ukiyo upon discovering the work of Japanese-American author Cynthia Kadohata. Her first book, The Floating World (1991), tells the story of Olivia, who spends her childhood and adolescence traveling with her family across the United States in the 1950’s. Her father searches for jobs amidst postwar anti-Asian discrimination, and Olivia’s grandmother describes their lives as “the floating world” due to their constant state of movement. The book’s title has always stuck with me, as Kadohata’s works –especially Kira-Kira (2004), which won the Newberry Medal – were some of my first introductions to the lives of Asian immigrants and/or Asian Americans in the U.S. and the rampant discrimination that they have faced in this country, from the U.S. Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), to Executive Order 9066 (1942), to the murder of Vincent Chin (1982), to present day.

In the past couple of years, that has been a disturbing rise of anti-Asian discrimination and hate crimes in the United States, specifically related to the racist, incorrect notion that Chinese people are responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. Dangerous rhetoric such as “the China virus” or “kung flu” are disgusting beyond reproach, and seeing videos of elderly people getting robbed and/or physically assaulted due to their race is heartbreaking. In the wake of these attacks, the hashtag #StopAsianHate spread like wildfire online. While this hashtag is an important showing of solidarity, we must remember that the fight for stronger diversity and inclusion is a lot bigger than online support.

GIRLS 17: The Floating World features interviews from Asian American womxn in the arts sector.

In the U.S., the month of May is celebrated as Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month, and I am so honored to have compiled this issue in celebration of Asian American art workers who have been sadly overlooked. I would like to thank Aleesa, Dawn, JiaJia, Melissa, and Vanessa for participating in this issue and speaking so candidly about their work and their hopes for better inclusion of Asian and Asian American people in the arts.

ALEESA PITCHAMARN ALEXANDER

Courtesy of Harrison Truong

Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander is the Robert M. and Ruth L. Halperin Associate

Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, where she has been since 2018. As a curator, Aleesa is committed to providing meaningful platforms for historically excluded artists and opportunities to expand narratives in the history of art through collection building, exhibitions, and community outreach. At the Cantor, she is curator of The Faces of Ruth Asawa (July 2022 – Ongoing), East of the Pacific: Making Histories of Asian American Art (Sept. 28, 2022 – Feb. 12, 2023), and The Medium Is the Message: Art since 1950 (Feb. 23, 2019 – Ongoing). Working with assistant professor of art history Marci Kwon, Aleesa is Co-Director of the Asian American Art Initiative (AAAI), which is working to transform the Cantor into the preeminent institution for the collection, display, and study of Asian American/Asian diasporic art in the United States. Aleesa cultivates relationships with community members, donors, artist estates, and living artists to help build the Cantor’s growing collection of Asian American art, which is now one of the best nationally.

Aleesa has contributed to multiple exhibition catalogs and publications, most recently she has written about Ruth Asawa, Dominque Fung, and Lien Truong. With Marci Kwon, she co-edited a special issue of Panorama (where she also serves on the advisory board), about Asian American art in 2021. Her scholarship has been supported by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the Center for Craft, Creativity, and Design, the Terra Foundation for American Art, and the American Craft Council. A first-generation college graduate, Aleesa grew up between Bangkok, Thailand, Vancouver Island, British Columbia, and Salem, Oregon. She received her PhD in Art History from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2018.

ALEESA PITCHAMARN ALEXANDER

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. It took place in April 2023.

GM: What was your path to becoming a curator, as well as your current job at the Cantor Arts Center?

APA: I was always artistically inclined as a child, but in high school I became more interested in the long history of art and what others made through my AP Art History class From then on, for better or worse, I knew I wanted to be an art historian. When I ended up at Willamette University, I started interning at the university art museum, the Hallie Ford Museum of Art, which was transformative to me. It showed me how art history can be made and remade within an institutional space. After that, I interned at the Art Institute of Chicago, and then started a PhD program in Art History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. From 2017-2018 I was a Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellow at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I got to contribute to two incredible exhibitions while working on my dissertation. During this time, I applied for my job at the Cantor, for which I was then hired. My path was rather straightforward, though it did take a long time and was incredibly difficult. I will also say that though I did work very hard, there was a certain amount of luck involved (as there always is). I don’t want to give the erroneous impression that if you simply follow this course, you can get a job as a curator. Curatorial positions in museums are highly sought after. I understand that I am privileged to hold this role – I never had a “Plan B” in life and I am grateful things worked out the way they did.

GM: Alongside Marci Kwon, you are Founding Co-Director of the Asian American Art Initiative (AAAI) at the Cantor. How did the initiative come to fruition, and why was it important to the both of you to execute this at a college arts museum in the Bay Area?

APA: Marci started at Stanford in 2016 and shortly after began thinking of what it would mean to start an initiative about Asian American art. When I started at the Cantor in 2018, I came on specifically to serve as the curatorial counterpart – in order to organize exhibitions and build a collection, you need someone working inside the museum who can help lead the institution. (Continued)

Dr Alexander touring East of the Pacific as part of the convening IMU UR2: Art, Aesthetics, and Asian America, Oct. 28-29, Stanford University. Photo credit: Harrison Truong

ALEESA PITCHAMARN ALEXANDER

Installation view of East of the Pacific: Making Histories of Asian American Art (September 28, 2022 - February 12, 2023, Cantor Arts Center). This exhibition was one of three inaugural shows for the Asian American Art Initiative and was curated by Dr Alexander Photo

Credit: Johnna Arnold

The potential of the AAAI was the primary reason I came to the Cantor, as I knew this was a unique opportunity to make a significant contribution to art history. Being situated on a university campus was also particularly appealing, as we really believe an initiative like this is best served in an academic environment. The AAAI is based at the Cantor but connected to multiple entities on campus, like academic departments, Stanford Libraries and Special Collections, and the Asian American Activities Center. Additionally, the history of the Bay Area and Stanford is particularly compelling for the AAAI: this is the region where some of the first Asian migrants arrived in the United States, working to help build the railroads and Stanford’s campus. The term “Asian American” was also coined in 1968 as a political gesture by student activists in the Bay Area.

GM: You’ve conducted an astounding amount of research on the artist Ruth Asawa, which has resulted in the exhibition The Faces of Ruth Asawa (2022 – Ongoing) at the Cantor. Why is contributing scholarship about Ruth Asawa important to you, and what was your experience curating the exhibition?

APA: I have admired Ruth Asawa’s work and practice since graduate school, never imagining that I’d get to work on such a significant project about her. Asawa is one of the few Asian American artists who has received a high level of art historical and museological recognition. Even so, the hundreds of masks she made over the course of more than 35 years remain under-the-radar in relation to her wire sculptures, but they were such a significant part of her output and reflect her deeply democratic and inclusive approach towards the world. (Continued)

ALEESA PITCHAMARN ALEXANDER

The best thing we can do for significant artists is honor their practice through deep and rigorous research, thereby offering a new perspective on an artist’s life and career. That’s what I was trying to do with The Faces of Ruth Asawa, and I feel good about what we’ve achieved. In addition, I had such a lovely time working with Asawa’s family members on this project – it’s amazing to experience how her legacy lives on.

GM: How do you think society should steer conservations about diversity and safety beyond the #StopAsianHate Movement?

APA: I do find it particularly upsetting – and nefarious – that AAPI lives only seem to “matter” more in the media when they are being visibly threatened. At the same time, violence against Asian Americans is something that does need to be discussed – but so does our joy, success, and complexity.

GM: What are you currently working on in your practice, including any upcoming plans for the AAAI?

APA: I’m working on three exhibitions that will open in 2024 related to the Asian American Art Initiative. One of the lessons I learned from working on my last major exhibition, East of the Pacific: Making Histories of Asian American Art (Sept. 28, 2022 – Feb. 12, 2023, at the Cantor), was that so many AAPI artists of prior generations had difficulty finding platforms for support, in part because of their race and ethnicity. This led to many of these artists being almost entirely excluded from the historical record In an effort to help prevent that from happening to another generation, I’m looking forward to working with living artists – many of them emerging – to help provide meaningful opportunities for engagement. As the AAAI is an ongoing project, Marci and I can also take our time to plan our next steps, which is great; doing meaningful, thoughtful work takes time That being said, fall 2024 will be a very exciting season at the Cantor.

(L-R): Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander, Christine Y. Kim, Stephanie Syjuco, Asma Naeem, and Alexandra Chang on the panel "Institutional Interventions", as part of the convening IMU UR2: Art, Aesthetics, and Asian America, Oct 28-29, Stanford University Photo Credit: Harrison Truong

DAWN CHAN

Photo by Dawn Chan

Dawn Chan is a writer who contributes frequently to The New York Times and Artforum. You can also find her writing in The Atlantic.com, Bookforum, The New Yorker.com, New York Magazine, The Paris Review, and The Village Voice. A recipient of a Warhol Arts Writing Grant as well as a Thoma Foundation Arts Writing Award in Digital Art, Dawn currently teaches as a core faculty member at Bard College's Center for Curatorial Studies. Her writing appears in anthologies such as Science Fiction (Whitechapel/MIT Press, 2020), Best! Letters from Asian Americans in the Arts (Paper Monument, 2021), and in the forthcoming Weeb Theory (Banner Repeater Press, 2023).

DAWN CHAN

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. It took place in March 2023.

GM: What was your path to becoming a writer and editor?

DC: During undergrad, I'd done a fair amount of coursework in studio art. I had this notion that I would move to New York, set up a studio, make work, and start showing work. What I was making took up a lot of space The financial challenges of finding a big enough studio that was affordable only piled on to all the usual, more existential roadblocks that all artists starting out have to grapple with. For example, I’m talking about all the years an early-career artist has to stick to their vision, without an ounce of external validation. If you can believe in what you make for years, whether or not that belief ends up mirrored by others – that's a special trait. I think that those of us without it soon turn our efforts towards projects propelled forward by the motivational structures offered by institutions, communities, deadlines, and/or back-and-forth conversations. In my case, various friends working at magazines [who were] in need of content convinced me to try writing pieces for them here and there. And that work just somehow turned into more work.

GM: You are currently an editor for November, a non-profit magazine that features long-form interviews on art, architecture, media, and politics. How did this editorial project come to fruition, and what has been your experience working for it?

DC: All credit for November goes to founding editors Emmanuel Olunkwa and Lauren O'NeillButler. They had the vision to start this project in the midst of the pandemic, and then half a year later kindly brought me and others on board as the project was expanding in its scope. Lauren and I had worked side by side at Artforum.com for nearly a decade, and I wasn't going to miss an opportunity to collaborate with her again. Nowadays, I find myself constantly wanting to contribute more work to the project, but I am always short on time.

Image from "Grand Panorama of the Kowloon Walled City": Kowloon City Expedition (photos and statements), Terasawa Kazumi (drawing), Hiroaki Kani (supervision) Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten Publishers, July 1997

GM: You co-curated the exhibition Phantom Plane: Cyberpunk in the Year of the Future (2019-20) for the Tai Kwun Centre for Heritage and Arts in Hong Kong, which was co-presented by CCS Bard. What was your experience working on this exhibition, and what do you hope the audience took from it?

DC: That show was a very collaborative curatorial effort, with curators Lauren Cornell, Tobias Berger, and Xue Tan at the helm, and Jeppe Ugelvig contributing expert curatorial work and research. Working with that much museum space was a terrific opportunity, as was sitting at a table full of top-notch curatorial minds throwing top-notch ideas into the mix. Memorably, the show happened to coincide with a significant wave of pro-democracy protests taking place throughout Hong Kong. People did come to the opening of Phantom Plane, but the mood was somber. Many showed up dressed in the signature black outfits that the protesters had adopted. There were fires raging throughout the city later that night, traffic jams, clashes with police, tear-gas canisters in the streets. It all made certain artworks that we'd included resonate in a manner we hadn't expected at all. As it happened, the ways that cyberpunk had once laid out various aesthetic and speculative approaches for the envisioning of broader societal futures suddenly felt eerily adjacent to the ways that young people in Hong Kong were testing out their own ability to chart a path forward on their own terms. You couldn't help but be reminded that all art is encountered through the lens of the moment, which might be one of the chaotic, alchemical aspects of exhibiting art that curators have no choice but to embrace.

Shinro Ohtake, MON CHERI: A Self-Portrait as a Scrapped Shed (2012), Tai Kwun Contemporary. Courtesy of Take Ninagawa, Tokyo Copyright: Shinro Ohtake

Exhibition view of Phantom Plane: Cyberpunk in the Year of the Future (2019), Tai Kwun Contemporary. (L-R): Tetsuya Ishida, Aria Dean, Nurrachmat Widyasena

Photo: Kwan Sheung Chi.

GM: You have written essays about the concept of Asian futurism for numerous publications – why is this topic important to you?

DC: Asian futurism is a topic I've thought quite a bit about ever since the visionary writer and critic Ryan Lee Wong, author of Which Side Are You On (2022), introduced me to the notion years ago in a conversation at a Chinatown bar. We'd both turned up for a group viewing of Fresh Off The Boat, which at the time was the first primetime U S TV show in decades to feature a cast of Asian and Asian American actors. Soon after that, I wrote about Asian futurism in 2016 for Artforum. Around that time, discussions around the notion of "representation" had taken on a renewed intensity. But along with those discussions, there was the ever-present realization that checking boxes and meeting numerical quotas would always be a flat, simplistic response to a complicated reality To me, Asian futurism seemed like one way to move from quantitative questions to qualitative ones: what does it mean that the notion of a futuristic Asian city, whether utopian or dystopian, has taken hold in global imaginations? How does that notion in turn affect the sorts of artwork by Asian diasporic artists that are selected and amplified in exhibition spaces? How does Asian futurism affect the reception and understanding of such work worldwide? My first writings [about] the subject were very much done from my position and perspective as an American, but [there was] the extent to which the discussion expanded globally. Hearing from the U.K. professor who added it to their syllabus, or the Hong Kong based artist sharing some handwritten translations of it on social media, was both really rewarding and eye-opening

GM: How do you think society should steer conversations about diversity and safety beyond the #StopAsianHate Movement?

DC: The #StopAsianHate movement was clearly an urgent response to a moment when we saw people be racialized as Asian in public spaces and consequently designated targets of unspeakable violence. Beyond that urgency, one wonders if and how such broad public conversations can now move in a direction of nuance. (Continued)

Nadim Abbas, Fake Present Eons (After Posenenske) (2019), Tai Kwun Contemporary. Commissioned by Tai Kwun Contemporary. Photo: Kwan Sheung Chi.

These conversations can only grow more productive when we can start to acknowledge the permeable, unstable aspects of race that hashtags simply cannot capture. Start with the very reductionistic fact that the term Asian, as it is used in America, encompasses both various South Asian and East Asian communities, even when these communities end up racialized in ways that have historically subjected them to completely different patterns of violence. I think of the slurs hurled at an Indian American colleague post 9/11, as compared to the slurs encountered on the street by a Chinese-American colleague during the pandemic. The inadequacies of even the term "Asian" – the very term that needed to stay simple, in order for hashtags to go viral – underscore the ways that conversations, and the vocabularies that underpin these conversations, need to keep evolving toward nuance

GM: What are you currently working on in your practice?

DC: This spring, photographer Tommy Kha staged a two-room show at Baxter Street Camera Club, and it was a privilege to be able to contribute as a curator. My intention is to write primarily and curate very occasionally, but I couldn’t pass up the chance to work with Kha, who is really doing fresh things with photography. Meanwhile, colleagues at November convinced me to finally finish and publish a piece about the contemporary art resonances of Kowloon Walled City, [which is] an iconic, infamously unplanned building complex in Hong Kong that functioned outside of government rule And for now, I'm trying to keep up a balance between writing and teaching, but have also started working on a piece that tries to interweave many different things: verb tenses, counterfactual worlds, in-between worlds, urban futurism, and constructions of self, set in Hong Kong. We'll see!

Exhibition view of Ghost Bites: Tommy Kha (2023), Baxter St. Camera Club. Photo: Lloyd McCullough.

JIAJIA FEI

Courtesy of Joshua Rosenthal

JiaJia Fei is a digital strategist and founder of the first digital agency for art. In her work with museums, galleries, and artists, her practice centers on the mission of making art more accessible through technology. Prior to starting her own consultancy, JiaJia served as the first Director of Digital at The Jewish Museum in New York and Associate Director of Digital Marketing at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. JiaJia received her BA in the History of Art from Bryn Mawr College and has lectured on the impact of art and technology worldwide.

JIAJIA FEI

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. It took place in April 2023.

GM: You describe yourself as a digital strategist – what was your path to this career?

JF: I always knew I wanted to be in the art world, but it took working my way through its institutions to realize that I needed to carve out a place of my own within it In school, I studied art history, but never aspired to be a curator or art historian like any of my peers. I was also interested in technology, but never imagined it would be such a critical part of my career. Just for fun, I taught myself how to code and build websites – little did I know that these skills would prove even more useful than my art history degree. Eventually, I ended up in a museum job where I found a way to combine both these skills, and stayed for over a decade before I ended up as one of those people who would be there for decades. As someone at the rare intersection of art and technology, I saw an opportunity to position myself as a translator for art and tech, and so I created a business out of it.

GM: You were previously the Associate Director of Digital Marketing at The Guggenheim Museum and the Director of Digital at The Jewish Museum, often being referred to as a “problem solver for museums”. What was your experience in these roles, and why did you decide to stop working for museums?

JF: In a way, I never stopped working for museums because I now have the privilege of working with incredible museums around the world as a consultant. Museums are unique and complicated organizations, and it takes working inside of them – from the bottom up – to fully grasp both the challenges and opportunities. As a lifelong learner, I learned so much from these first experiences, but knew it was time to move on when I kept solving the same problems over and over again. It was time to find new problems to solve.

Courtesy of Michael Avedon

Christine Wong Yap, Hopes for Chinatown (YY)

GM: In 2020, you founded the first digital agency for art. Why did you decide to become your own boss, and what do you hope to accomplish with this venture?

JF: My consulting business was a long time in the making; I still consider The Guggenheim and The Jewish Museum to be my first clients, in a way. They were case studies for digital transformation that I knew many other museums, galleries, and even artists were actively seeking – and no one else was doing it. I recognized a seismic gap in the art world, especially compared to other creative industries, when it came to digital strategy and integrating technology as both infrastructure and a communication tool. My goal was to take all the knowledge I had gained in this space and bring in other talented creative technologists along the way in order to help arts institutions further their mission and ultimately help make art more widely accessible to more people through technology.

GM: What could art institutions do to better engage with AAPI art and artists, especially in terms of exhibition organizing and programming thematics?

JF: I am against tokenism and never think it’s a good idea to include artists or work in a show just because they check a box. Instead, I think institutions should think more holistically and long-term about the inclusion of all identities and perspectives, starting with the roles that have the most potential to influence what the public sees. By hiring a diverse and representative staff who have inclusive points of view, this type of change is generative and more meaningful. Within museums, a change in guard, especially at the highest level, is often quite rare, as many museum directors and curators tend to stay in their jobs for a very long time, sometimes for decades or for life. My colleagues and I often joke that to get one of these coveted museum jobs, you basically have to wait for someone to die. My suggestion? Term limits.

(Copyright © the artist and For Freedoms, 2021)

JIAJIA FEI

GM: How do you think society should steer conversations about diversity and safety beyond the #StopAsianHate Movement?

JF: The #StopAsianHate movement was a specific moment in time where it seemed like nearly all Asian Americans united around their identity in solidarity. Unfortunately, this unity was reactive and incited by violence. This is not unlike the history of how the term “Asian American” came to be. “Asian American” was coined by activists Yuji Ichioka and Emma Gee in 1968 as a social and political identity to inspire activism in response to anti-Asian discrimination, and as a rejection of the derogatory term “Oriental.” As an Asian American, it’s a shame that conversations around identity are often born from hate. Instead, we need to celebrate everyday moments that center expansive joy and care, stand in solidarity with other BIPOC communities, and show the multitudes of AAPI identity. This was precisely the goal of our AAPI Solidarity campaign at For Freedoms, an organization I’ve worked with for the past several years. To imagine diversity and safety, we need to be visionary not reactionary.

GM: What are you currently working on?

JF: I’m currently working on a new digital brand identity and launch for a forthcoming book focusing on women artists, advising a few organizations on their websites, managing way too many social media accounts, and continuing to work with my clients to tell their stories online.

Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya, Seeding Hope (Copyright © the artist and For Freedoms, 2021)

VANESSA HOLYOAK

Courtesy of Caroline Hunter Wallis

Vanessa Holyoak (U.S., Canada) is a Los Angeles-based writer and artist working across installation, photography, video, performance, and language. She constructs uncanny, minimalist environments that allude to notions of memory, loss, and the cognitive overload of the present, often working as an artist duo with Antoine Chesnais. Through dreamlike juxtapositions of objects, moving and still images, light, and sound articulated through a speculative fiction lens, her work raises questions about cultural and ecological displacement and disappearance, both present and potential. She also writes hybrid fiction and art criticism and is researching the liberatory potential of dreams, sleep, and darkness across both literature and visual art. Holyoak holds a dual MFA in Photography & Media and Creative Writing from the California Institute of the Arts and a BA from Barnard College. She is a PhD candidate in Comparative Media & Culture at USC, where she is also pursuing the Performance Studies Graduate Certificate. Select exhibitions include Casa Lü in CDMX, Columbia University and Beyond Studios in NYC, Willow Street Gallery in Washington, D.C., CCA PLAySpace in San Francisco, and Harkawik, Eastside International, Nomad Pavilion, the Bendix Building, Human Resources, and CalArts in LA. Her writing has been published in BOMB, e-flux, East of Borneo, Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles, and Hyperallergic. Forthcoming exhibitions include Au Pair and LA Artcore, and her first novel, I See More Clearly in the Dark, is forthcoming from Sming Sming Books in May 2023.

VANESSA HOLYOAK

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. It took place in March 2023.

GM: You identify as an artist, writer, and curator – what was your path to this multidisciplinary career?

VH: I’ve always had a creative writing practice, mostly in experimental fiction. In college, I got exposed to my first studio [art] classes, and pairing my photography with my writing was my first foray into having a visual practice. That was the “gateway drug” to realizing that I could think of my practice in visual terms, and that my writing didn’t have to be limited to the formal structures established by literary traditions. I became really interested in the ways that language can be used within the space of the visual. I feel like those early investigations into intermediality between text and image were really what pushed me to pursue an ongoing creative practice. After college, I went to CalArts and got a dual MFA in Creative Writing and Photography & Media. I had these two paths, which at times would intersect but also became their own separate practices. […] I started working more with my partner, Antoine Chesnais, who is French and trained as a photographer. We became really invested in opening up the two-dimensional image into a three-dimensional space, and creating these embodied installations that function almost as dream spaces for the viewer to slow down, wander through, and take in. […] Since finishing my MFA, I’ve also started working as an art writer. I think that my curiosity for both literature and art naturally brought me to a point where I was thinking and writing a lot about art, through intersections of art and language. I’ve also done two curatorial projects, the first while I was in my MFA program. My friend Ieva Raudsepa and I curated Seeing Words and Other Things, a show that brought objects and words together and looked at artists whose practices perform relationality between the two. Last summer, my friend Shay Myerson and I started a curatorial collective called Midnight's Watchtower. We organized a performance event at Commons, a space run by my friend, Claire Chambless, which took the form of a series of performances around the theme of prologues and false starts Coming out of the pandemic, [there were] all these repetitive questions – “Can we go out again, or are we locked down?”

GM: Your first novel, I See More Clearly in the Dark, will be released this May. What is your novel about, and what inspired you to write it?

VH: I See More Clearly in the Dark started as a short story and zine that later became the novel. The zine was available as a takeaway in a video installation of the same name Antoine and I built a black fabric structure with a mossy green carpet and printed the text onto transparency film. Inside the fabric structure, we used an analog slide projector to project these homemade slides, and layered the text over a projected video of long, static shots of a very dark, lush forest in the Pacific Northwest The novel is being published through an independent artist-run press in the Bay Area called Sming Sming Books. Vivian Sming, who runs the press, is incredible and it’s been so great working with her. The summer before I started writing the novel, I read this long-form essay by the Japanese novelist Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, “In Praise of Shadows” (1933/1977) (Continued)

VANESSA HOLYOAK

[It’s] about the role of darkness in East Asian culture and undoing the Western hierarchy around dark and light [in order] to re-value darkness and unknowing, rather than categorizing everything according to Western Enlightenment logic. It talks a lot about the ways in which places for darkness are carved out in traditional Japanese homes. There isn’t this emphasis on light in the way there is in modern Western architecture. I got really invested in thinking about darkness from this alternative perspective, as a space of intimacy and indeterminacy, and began writing this novel based off of a quote from the book. It goes something like: “To snatch away from us the darkness beneath trees that stand deep in the forest is the most heartless of crimes.” I started thinking about the ecological implications of disappearing darkness…what does deforestation mean on both an ethical and aesthetic level? What does it mean to not have that darkness in the forest, that unknown? That’s the premise for the novel; it’s lightly speculative fiction, bordering on the poetic, and very much an artist's book. There’s not a ton of strong narrative impulse. The general idea is based on a fictionalized Paris, France, where there’s this resort plan in which governments are intervening to destroy national forests and replace them with these really homogenous, very white and shiny surveillance-style resorts. People are being forcibly relocated into them from both the cities and all over the country. The premise of the book is that the protagonist’s lover was forcibly taken one year ago as part of this resort plan, and the book takes place through flashbacks over the following year. It’s about her wandering through a dystopian Paris and trying to find agency in a world without darkness, trying to see how to negotiate her relationships to other bodies now that her lover is out of the picture. And I hope I'm not giving too much away, but there is a possibly happy ending where she flees to the edge of the forest to try to find alternate ways of existing outside of these governmental structures. The actual meat of the book follows this character’s very intense philosophical ruminations and experiences of embodiment.

Vanessa Holyoak, I SEE MORE CLEARLY IN THE DARK, 2019. Courtesy of Antoine Chesnais

VANESSA HOLYOAK

GM: You are currently a PhD student in Comparative Media and Culture at USC. What do you plan on focusing on in your graduate studies?

VH: I’m hoping to really consolidate these philosophical ideas that are already present in my creative practices and approach them from a more theoretical/scholarly standpoint I’m definitely interested in continuing to look at ideas of darkness as a potential fugitive space, or site of resistance from hegemonic capitalism. In line with that, [I’m also] thinking about other dark spaces, such as spaces of memory, dreams, and sleep as ways of resisting capitalism, colonialism, etc. Through both the visual art and literary canons, [I’m] looking at practices that embody those ideas and open up more unwieldy durations and forms of embodiment, with temporalities that don’t fit into the neat frame of disciplinary (art historical or literary) boundaries.

GM: What could art institutions do to better engage with AAPI art and artists, especially in terms of exhibition organizing and programming thematics?

VH: Although I’ve never worked in a museum myself, my first impulse would be to hire Asian Americans as curators and art administrators, or place them in other roles of power to give them the agency to make more inclusive decisions, and to showcase Asian American artists [Having the] makeup of your employees at an institution reflect the actual diversity of society would already be a huge step, rather than this performative virtue signaling where institutions claim alliances with certain communities without actually rethinking the foundational structures and makeup of who has power in the institution. So, the first step is actually giving Asian American thinkers, artists, etc. that decision-making power, which hopefully would create greater inclusivity by reflecting our perspectives in the institution. This goes for other communities beyond Asian Americans as well; museums are still very white institutions. Diversify the voices, identities, and perspectives present, give them agency, and don’t reduce them to mere tokens of their identity positions.

Vanessa Holyoak, Aural Selves, 2018. Courtesy of Antoine Chesnais

VANESSA HOLYOAK

GM: How do you think society should steer conversations about diversity and safety beyond the #StopAsianHate Movement?

VH: Though I’m not a super active social media person, the idealist in me wants to believe that [the hashtag] would continue to have a positive ripple effect, but I do think there’s a lot of empty virtue signaling that goes on because of the ease with which one can regurgitate a hashtag without actually reflecting on the deeper structural issues that the initial message is calling for. That’s one of the dangers, this tendency to make virtue signaling without structural change really easy. We can’t settle for these easy, band-aid solutions that are often just really performative and don’t go further than skindeep in a lot of cases. You haven’t done the work if you’ve only shared the hashtag. You need to actually do the work, and that’s what will count. I think that work can happen or at least begin through education and exposure to diverse perspectives, through tough and empowering conversations, and through listening.

GM: What are you currently working on in your practice?

VH: A lot of my installation practice is now as an artist-duo with my partner, Antoine. We have a two-person show coming up in May at Au Pair in the Bendix Building, a space run by the artist Jason Burgess I'm also performing at Monte Vista Projects as part of the one-night show Irrational Exhibits, a durational performance event organized by Deborah Oliver, on May 27. My book is also coming out in May, so it’s going to be a crazy month (Laughs). We have another show at LA Art Core in Little Tokyo that’s opening in mid-August and will run through mid-September. For both of those shows, we’re going to be developing projects that were born out of different residencies that we had the opportunity to attend in recent years, as society begun to emerge from COVID. We went to Scotland in 2021 to attend this residency called Cove Park in the Scottish Highlands, and have been working on a new photo-based project born out of our time there. At Au Pair, we’re developing a project we started last year during a residency in Mexico City at a space called Casa Lü. I’m excited to have the opportunity to see these projects through!

Vanessa Holyoak, At Night I No Longer Fear The Future, 2020 Courtesy of Antoine Chesnais

MELISSA WANG

Photo by Khoi Do

Melissa Wang received her B.A. in Literature/Writing from the University of California, San Diego and her M.A. in English from the University of California, Davis. She researched science-fiction as a PhD candidate before segueing to tech. In 2019, she began a professional arts practice, and has since exhibited at the Woman Made Gallery in Chicago, Il; Iowa Ceramics Center in Cedar Rapids, IA; Torrance Art Museum in Los Angeles, CA; and the de Young Museum in San Francisco, CA with a solo exhibition at Root Division (Frank-Ratchye space) in San Francisco, CA. Her work can be found in public spaces including Brown University in Providence, RI and Facebook in Menlo Park, CA. She is the recipient of an Individual Emerging Artist Fellowship from the California Arts Council in 2021. In early 2020, she founded her design studio, leveraging her experience at Facebook (Meta) and Google to serve creatives during the pandemic. She helped launch the late Rose Imai’s website and co-organized an art auction with artist Cindy Shih, raising $11,000 for voter movement projects. In 2022, she curated her first in-person exhibition titled Grow Our Souls at SOMArts Gallery in San Francisco.

MELISSA WANG

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. It took place in March 2023.

GM: Your background is predominately in design, working for companies such as Meta and Google. What was your path to this career, and what caused you to transition into freelance design work?

MW: I became a designer because it paid the bills. I actually wanted to be an artist and writer, but couldn’t afford art school. I became a technical writer, which transitioned into a design role at a healthcare company. Eventually, I applied for and was accepted into a PhD program in Literature at UC Davis. However, I was more in love with the idea of being a professor than the realities of being one I got my Master’s and quit, but I had a lot of debt and no capital to start any creative endeavor. All the highest-paying jobs were in tech, so I applied to design roles in the Bay Area, landing at a start-up before switching to Google. In 2017, I joined Facebook (now Meta). I met a lot of smart, humble, and ambitious people, worked with diverse teams from all around the world, and watched tens of thousands of people engage with my content But the dark side of social media is well-documented, and I felt more and more disillusioned with the company. In 2019, my inner voice asked me if I was doing what I wanted to do and there was a resounding NO. Then it asked if I still wanted to be an artist and it said YES. At the end of the year, I quit to become a full-time artist During the pandemic, I began freelance design, mostly working on friend’s websites as everything shifted digitally. I’ve paused freelance work in order to integrate design more intentionally in my art projects, especially installations.

GM: What mediums do you work with in your art practice, and could you talk about your solo exhibition at Root Division, Without The Stars, There Would Be No Us?

MW: I paint with acrylics and sketch with watercolors, markers, and pastels. Recently, I’ve been exploring organic materials like moss, grass, and thistle I also work with inspired and found materials, like in my solo exhibition, Without The Stars, There Would Be No Us which was conceptualized in late 2020 (Continued)

Melissa Wang, Without The Stars, There Would Be No Us, 2021

I read a lot of science-fiction about space flight and discovered Lee Bul’s work, a South Korean artist whose installation Civitas Solis was inspired by a birds-eye view of cities from above Many speculative/sci-fi theorists predict that light-speed space travel is the crux to humanity’s evolution. When we encounter other civilizations or worlds, will we see our greatest hopes, or fears, mirrored? Will we become our ideal, better selves – or our worst nightmares? I played with literal and metaphorical concepts of light; for example, light is one of the universe’s only constants, a form that travels in a line unless disrupted With the human eye, what looks like a star in the sky may already be dead; only its light is still traveling towards us. Subconsciously, I gestured towards stars as our ancestors.

GM: In 2022, you curated your first exhibition, Grow Our Souls, for SOMArts Cultural Center. The exhibition highlighted twelve Asian and Asian American femme and/or queer artists What was your experience curating this exhibition, and what do you hope the audience took from it?

MW: I grew up working in my parent’s shop. Customers would walk into our store, break our merchandise, and claim they were “cheaply” made in China My husband worked in his parent’s nail salon So it wasn’t hard to imagine that the six Asian women killed in Atlanta in 2021 could’ve been our aunties. After the shooting, I asked myself these questions: why do we fetishize or dehumanize certain kinds of labor? How has our relationship to labor been transformed by the pandemic? Around the same time, I read an interview by Grace Lee Boggs. Her lifelong investment in labor rights led her to develop her own dialectical philosophy: our souls grow our works and our works grow our souls. Logistically, the show was difficult to execute as earlier that year, I was diagnosed with Berger’s, a rare chronic illness. I’m grateful to the many artists, volunteers, partners (Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center, Asian American Women Artists Association, and SOMArts Cultural Center), and community members who showed up to support and work on the show, as it could not have happened without them. Lastly, I wanted to target younger viewers who were reconsidering their line of work in light of the pandemic. I chatted with visitors who said it inspired them to seek creative abundance.

Installation view of Grow Our Souls (2022) Photo by and courtesy of Diana Chen

MELISSA WANG

GM: How do you think society should steer conservations about diversity and safety beyond the #StopAsianHate Movement?

MW: Currently, U.S. judiciary processes are insufficient. For example, we can collect data on hate-crimes, but how do we enact justice when it’s almost impossible to adjudicate anti-Asian hate crimes? We are locked in decades and centuries-old debates about police brutality, school shootings, and/or reproductive freedom. A conversation is not enough to address the urgency of freedom from harm – people have to concretize change. That can take the form of governance – people running for office, unionizing, etc. – or advocacy, through policy proposals, petitions, or lawsuits. I also believe in the value of protest as the expression of a collective voice. As an artist, I’m less interested in appealing to institutions, and more interested in inspiring people with works that imagine different world views.

GM: What could art institutions do to better engage with AAPI art and artists, especially in terms of exhibition organizing and programming thematics?

MW: When working with institutions, I’m always curious: Does your leadership and board reflect partner or community demographics? Do you care about safety, inclusivity and accessibility, which disproportionately impacts those who are most vulnerable (and most often forgotten)? Does your organization fetishize the artworks that it sells or the artists that are represented? Personally, I think we can all dream a little bigger than identity-themed exhibitions. In my press release for Grow Our Souls, I didn’t explicitly call out the artists’ racial and gender identities. As an artist, our works are not necessarily expressing experiences of race, gender or sexuality, but looking at broader themes. For example, Connie Zheng’s speculative seed gardens and food maps interrogate the intricate and complex web of labor that organize one of our basic means of nourishment, while leveraging gardens as literal and metaphorical sites of re-worlding.

Documentation of a panel event during the opening reception for Grow Our Souls (2022).

Photo by and courtesy of Joyce Xi

GM: What are you currently working on in your practice?

MW: I’ve been working on a new series of paintings titled Dreams. Laura Harjo’s kin-space- time theory has been helpful, as well as Silvia Federici’s works on ecofeminism and magic. I also draw inspiration from ancient cosmologies, mythology, and contemporary sci-fi or fantasy It’s a continuation and expansion of my exploration of the cosmos, and the speculative landscapes that I create about entanglements between human and nonhuman forms of sentience I’m interested in cycles of decay and regeneration, and the dialectic between chaos and form, mystery and materiality, isolation and intimacy, and sacrifice and solace. As technological advancements like artificial intelligence advance our existential crises (including the separation of self from nature), what intimate, nourishing and healing relations to the world remain? Are stars ancestors or future sites of colonization? What can we learn from queer, regenerative mycelium? These questions inform my process, in which I build dense layers of media or materials, reflecting the evolving and palimpsestic nature of identities, nations, and mythologies. By expressing the nonlinearity of space and time, I aim to do what Silvia Federici calls “re-enchanting” our relationship to the cosmos. In our age of extraction and precocity, my works profess abundance and bliss.

Melissa Wang, Love Spell, 2022

Melissa Wang, Two Becomes Three, 2023

GIRLS MAGAZINE

THE FLOATING WORLD