You accessed your family’s history through relying on oral storytelling and archives. How did these forms of research combine to inform your artwork? 

Very slowly and circuitously. Sometimes, when I’d read a story in folklore and something would sound familiar, I would ask somebody in my family about it and they wouldn’t know. But then I'll remember later I’ll get a flicker and remember like a story my dad had talked about or I’ll remember something that makes a connection. The connections happen after the work is made, which is a little bit spooky.
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Sometimes, while I’m in the process of making an artwork, a friend might visit my studio and talk about what I’m thinking about. Those friends might have experiences with what I'm researching and that was the case for this body of work. I had found a photo album of these two mountains that were near the province where my father's family is from in the Philippines. I was in Michigan with another artist who had been to this sacred mountain. He shared all his pictures and research with me, which was amazing. I also have an auntie who's like my mentor. She teaches me about ancient Filipino script and Filipino spirituality. She had mentioned this mountain to me before I went to Michigan, so I had known about it. I was already talking to people about it, and then I found it in the archives, and then I talked to them again. Or sometimes, someone in my family will see a painting and it'll trigger a memory and they'll tell me a story. When my grandmother was alive, I just used to ask her a million questions and she would tell me stories.

I do have letters that she wrote and, and I ask other people for their memories too. That's not as fruitful compared to going straight to the source. I think the oral history thing is collective because without my mom being alive, there’s so much I can’t access. I can’t ask her, but I can ask my uncles, but they also have other stories that I don't know if my mom would know those things.

How much time did you spend researching in the archives before beginning to create these artworks? 

2017 was the first time I really spent day after day in an archive at the Newberry Library in Chicago. I spent a couple days at the Field Museum. I was in Chicago for about a month every day in the summer. Then, in Michigan, I had a two-week fellowship, which doesn't sound like a lot of time, but it was intensive. I got back from Michigan at the end of May last year and started using the research I did. But I’m still processing all of it—what I saw in Chicago, what I saw in Michigan. I'll probably be processing it forever and I'll probably go to another archive and then be processing that.

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Jane Wong is the author of two poetry collections: How to Not Be Afraid of Everything (Alice James, 2021) and Overpour (Action Books, 2016). Her debut memoir, Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City, is forthcoming from Tin House in May 2023. A Kundiman fellow, she is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships and residencies from Harvard's Woodberry Poetry Room, the U.S. Fulbright Program, Artist Trust, the Fine Arts Work Center, Bread Loaf, Hedgebrook, Willapa Bay, the Jentel Foundation, and others. She is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Western Washington University.

Congratulations on How to Not Be Afraid of Everything! It’s such a well-crafted, tenacious, and rich collection and resonated so deeply with me, having come from very similar experiences. “Everything” is one of my favorite poems of all time. I was really proud of myself for understanding the Chinese characters. How did “Everything” develop? What does the word “everything” connote to you? 

That means the dumpling-filled world to me that my book resonated with you, thank you! "Everything" is definitely a central poem in the collection, especially since it's referenced in the title. I wrote this poem inspired by my dear friend and fantastic poet Chen Chen. He has a poem called "Poem in Noisy Mouthfuls" and at the end of that poem he writes: "No, I already write about everything --" and begins to list his "everythings." I teach this poem often and have my students write through their "everything"s (the themes, questions, things, people, creatures, etc. that keep coming back to them). And I knew I had to do it myself! These are my obsessions-- from language loss to my mother to my gambling father to the constant gaze of toxic white men. I am illiterate in Chinese and I only have a beginning/intermediate grasp of Cantonese. So, hilariously, I had to google translate the Chinese -- which I think some readers of Chinese might notice! It's a kind of inside joke -- that I had to do that. It makes the line "Sometimes I dream in Cantonese and I have no idea what is being said" even more haunting I think.

Visually, the book is broken up into six sections, which are each divided by a page with an illustration of a wave. At every consecutive section divider, the wave seems to be retreating and finally, the collection ends with an illustration of a moon. Can you talk about the visual creation of How to Not Be Afraid of Everything? 

Love this question! I have the design team at Alice James to thank for the beautiful interior, as well as the cover artist Kimothy Wu. I knew I wanted this artwork from Kimothy for the cover, thinking about that almost-touching moment between the girl and the lion. I fell in love with that terror and awe, this possibility of falling into the lion's maw. It feels both terrifying and startling. I also loved the color -- what I like to call "intestinal pink." That feels so right for all the guttural imagery in the book -- and all the writing about food! I really loved how this lion also lives in a kind of galactic space--- space waves. And, as you write, there's so much constant retreating in the section dividers -- how the space waves move across through time (the intermingled past, present, future). I love how the design time included a moon at the end, a kind of mirror/reflection moment. I felt like it was that moment of touching my ancestors!

I love that! The collection contains a great deal of imagery related to animals and the natural world—boar, rat, snake, worm, moss, mud, beet, etc. How does nature influence you and your work? 

It took me, surprisingly, a long time to notice how many creatures show up in my writing. I'm a bit obsessed with the strange underworlds of our environment -- especially creatures and flora that tend to get overlooked. I love slugs, rats, and mud. I really love low tide and getting my feet in the mud -- and the anemones that spring up in their green-pink glory. I feel like animals have these rhythms all their own -- and I've always wanted that kind of interior knowledge. Like, how does a worm know that I don't? It's funny because I grew up in a strip mall -- surrounded by parking lots and cement. But there were ants and pigeons and worms and accidental cilantro patches too. It's all nature!

Sections of “When You Died” have appeared in Foundry and Underblong. How did you decide on the final version to include in this collection? 

I think of "When You Died" as a long, serial poem--- which can be hard to publish as one cohesive whole! I sent along excerpts to wonderful journals like Underblong and they did such a great job of retaining its singular, yet cohesive story. I knew I wanted to have this long poem in the center of the book, as its own section, but I didn't necessarily know the order of these sections yet. I think of this poem as an epistolary, a long letter, to my ancestors who didn't survive the Great Leap Forward. I wanted to collapse time, to reach my hand to the other side of their world--- and feed them the tomato soup I was eating while researching this time period. I knew I wanted to end that poem with an opening -- with a bowl cracking open. That opening portal ends up being the last poem in the book, "After Preparing the Altar, the Ghosts Feast Feverishly." In that poem, my ghosts actually reply to "When You Died," which feels like a kind of magic I still have a hard time finding words for!

Speaking of researching, you’ve mentioned that you couldn’t research your history through interviewing your family. How did you access the history that you discussed in How to Not Be Afraid of Everything? 

Ooh, this is a tough question because it was pretty hard to research a history that is censored. There was a great deal of propaganda during the Great Leap Forward -- so much so that the numbers of deaths due to famine are continually contested (ranging from 15 million to 55 million). I primarily referred to Yang Jisheng's Tombstone, which was so fundamental to uncovering what happened during that time to my family -- his book is also deeply personal. It was a hard book to read and to be honest, I couldn't fully "read" it. I had to read a few pages and walk away. It was emotionally too difficult. While I couldn't speak directly to my family about what happened, I did listen very closely to what they did tell me -- in between moments of silence, i.e. why I'm not allowed to waste food. How my grandfather was adopted by a man in the village, who lost his family. This close listening -- like tuning your ear toward the center of the earth -- was central in personal stories of such deep trauma.

Thank you for sharing that. Silence is as significant as substance in many of your poems. In “MAD,” you ask readers to fill in the silence. How have you come to accept and act against cultural and familial silence, as well as the silence of Asian and Asian American history from Western education? 

Thank you for reading "MAD" so closely-- that poem is such an important one for me, thinking about rage and resistance. As the poem starts, it asks the readers to fill in the silence via mad libs, but then it gets progressively harder to avoid the word I want you to use (i.e. "you have big eyes for a ___"). There's anger in these expectations, in constantly being defined through the white gaze. It was a really long journey for me in terms of speaking out and demanding to be seen. The thing is, I never learned about my own history; Asian American history is so often left out of our formative education. I didn't have an Asian American literature class in college or graduate school. The first time I taught an Asian American studies class, I cried over the copy machine; the class I was teaching was also the class I always wanted to take. Whenever I teach Asian American literature, it's incredibly emotional -- for me and my students. For them, it's the first time they've ever heard of Angel Island poetry. It's ten weeks of writing/art by Asian Americans -- beyond that one token book they read in high school (often, when I ask my undergrads to name a book by an Asian American writer on that first day, some of them say Memoirs of a Geisha.. which is written by a white man. This is how silenced we are). It is absolutely central to me as a writer and as a teacher to be in resistance together. That this is not just Asian American history, it's American history everyone should know.

Questions permeate through this collection. You end with the poem “After Preparing the Altar, the Ghosts Feast Feverishly,” which is filled with compelling questions. What role does questioning serve in your words and life? 

Thank you for this beautiful question about questions! Poetry, for me, feels like a space where questions are fundamental. Poetry refuses clarity to a certain degree; that's what I love about it. The open-endedness of it, the question that leads to another question, the liminal space of not knowing (yet getting slightly closer). With that particular poem, I kept thinking about the questions as a means of communication—of what my ancestors would ask me. How would I answer? Is my answer also a question for them? Questions feel bewildering, yet they make me unearth what I thought was solid... I guess questions feel like excavation. Especially when it comes to my silenced history, I feel like I had to ask questions—and be open to the lack of answers.

Thank you so much for creating "The Poetics of Haunting," which is such a necessary and luminous project. How long did the project take? Do you see yourself extending this academic work?

Thank you so much for exploring this project! "The Poetics of Haunting" website is part of my dissertation--which explores the haunting impact of migration, war, and empire on the work of Asian American women poets -- generations after. While my dissertation is a monograph book, I really wanted a public scholarship/digital aspect--to reflect what each poet wanted to share in terms of haunting. I was so lucky to be able to speak to Don Mee Choi, Pimone Triplett, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Cathy Linh Che, Bhanu Kapil, Sally Wen Mao, Christine Shan Shan Hou, Monica Sok, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (from afar/across the spiritual/earthly world). And I gave each poet multiple options to respond with their ephemera. Bhanu recorded a kind of meditative altar offering. And Cathy shared family photographs. It was so moving! This particular digital humanities project took a year and half, but the dissertation took about three. I'd really love to return to this book one day, and find more creative ways to intertwine my creative and scholarly loves!

 I’m so excited for Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City! Can you tell me more about your upcoming memoir? 

 I'm both excited and nervous about my memoir, as this book feels super vulnerable -- and of course, writing in a different genre is nerve-wracking. The memoir is out on May 16th next year, via Tin House. I like to think of it as a love song for Asian American immigrant babies who grew up low-income and working class. There are lots of stories of growing up in a restaurant, about illegal dental care in New York City, and my father's gambling addiction. There's also a lot about hypersexualization as an Asian American woman-- and how I can't separate where I come from from my intimate experiences. My mom is a big thread throughout, thinking of her as the true poet in my ancestral line! I hope the book is funny and weird and felt. And I hope I made baby Jane proud -- who, in part, I wrote this book for.

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Noʻu Revilla is an ʻŌiwi poet and educator. Born and raised with the Līlīlehua rain of Waiʻehu on the island of Maui, she currently lives and loves with the Līlīlehua rain of Pālolo on Oʻahu. Her debut book Ask the Brindled (Milkweed Editions 2022) was selected by Rick Barot as a winner of the 2021 National Poetry Series. She also won the 2021 Omnidawn Broadside Poetry prize. She has performed throughout Hawaiʻi as well as in Canada, Papua New Guinea, and the United Nations. Her poetry has been adapted for theatrical productions in Aotearoa as well as exhibitions in the Honolulu Museum of Art and the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is a lifetime “slyly / reproductive” student of Haunani-Kay Trask. Learn more about Noʻu at nourevilla.com. 

Brandy Nalani McDougall called your work “poetry…for the gut…Oiwi poetry at its finest and fiercest.” What initially drew you to poetry? Why turn to poetry as a vehicle to solidify and defend familial history? 

I appreciate your choice to say: defend. Poetry, for me, exacts a closeness. In my early 20s, it was a transformative closeness that called me out on a lot of bullshit. I kept imitating dead white men because that’s what was put in front of me and I didn’t know how to reach for anything different. Representation matters.

At the time, I had just enrolled in a workshop with Robert Sullivan, a Māori poet, and we had a meeting to discuss my first poem of the semester. The draft was loaded with allusions to Greek mythology so I thought it checked all the “right” boxes. Yet with the hard copy of my poem in hand, he looked me in the eyes and asked: “Where is your culture? Where are your people?” No preambles, no cushion. I will always be grateful for how naked those questions were because I couldn’t hide. My culture was nowhere in that draft so essentially where the fuck was I? Every day poetry keeps me honest; it tests me, he alo a he alo (face to face). After so long in the closet and centuries of American colonization working every day to vanish who and what and how I love, I want to work toward closeness. 

Thank you for sharing that. I’m so glad that those questions were asked. I read that you learned Ōlelo Hawai‘i in your 20s. Why was acquiring this language necessary for you and how did it impact your work? 

Language is continuity. I feel closer to my lands and waters and ancestors when I’m able to wrap my mind around the world the way they did. In Hawaiʻi, for example, each place has names for their winds and rains, which means my kūpuna (ancestors) devoted time and observational rigor to studying how these elements shaped the land and its people. Clearly, for them, this kind of attention was valuable. So the names my kūpuna composed not only reflect a deep study of their environment but also a deep respect for the relationship between kanaka (people) and ʻāina (land). Naming practices reveal a lot about a relationship, especially in Hawaiʻi, and that’s what so much of poetry is, the responsibility of naming, renaming, or remembering names.

Speaking of imitating dead white writers in your previous answer and the responsibility of poetry as memory, which writers influenced you to cease this imitation and harness poetry to defy tradition and memorialize your ancestry? 

It’s not so much defying tradition, as if there is just one, but choosing to feed and be fed by other traditions. Right now my students and I are talking about the multiple and simultaneous, the many-named and many-bodied in terms of literary genealogy and futurity. When I think of this kind of work, I reach for writers like Leanne Simpson, Joy Harjo, and Audre Lorde. Indigenous Pacific women writers like Sia Figiel, Tusiata Avia, Teresia Teaiwa, and Selina Tusitala Marsh absolutely devastated me when I first started taking my poetry seriously. Their work broke me open. It had to...I forgot I was part-ocean.

I loved the conversation and connection between you and Jocelyn Kapumealani Ng in “letters to the gut house: collaboration & decolonial love in Hawaiʻi.” Why did you decide to write an essay together in epistolary form? 

Thank you so much for reading our collaboration, Sophia. Your aloha for that piece means a lot to me. Jocelyn is my collaboration soul mate and we’ve been writing letters to each other for years. When we get together, the worldbuilding that happens is fearless and tender. As a queer ‘Ōiwi femme who descends from shapeshifters, that balance is important. So on the way to AWP in 2019, I started writing a thank you letter to Joce for all the ways our collaborations have fed me. That six-hour flight was one hundred percent gutspill and I ended up presenting the letter on my panel. I came home and read it to her on the beach in Waikīkī, then she wrote me a letter in response, then I wrote again, then she wrote, back and forth – gratitude inspires reciprocity. The essay that Milkweed published weaves fragments of different letters we have written to each other. You could say it’s a little bit of light from different rooms in our gut house.

That spontaneity is so precious. You’ve dedicated several of your poems to younger family members. How do they inspire and inform your work? 

The manuscript of this book really turned when I realized that it wasn’t enough to just write against what I wanted to burn down—violence against Indigenous women, rape, homophobia, colonization. It can’t just be about what we help bring to an end. We also have to commit aloha to growing new ground. What are we helping to build? I write to my three nieces because I want them to know they are part of larger and longer conversations between Indigenous wahine who show up and protect each other. Wahine like myself, their mother, their grandmother, their great-grandmother, their other aunties, and people like Haunani-Kay Trask and Brandy Nālani McDougall. What I went through, I want that shit to stop with me. So I name each violence, I set them out in the sun. I want my nieces to see that ʻŌiwi women can name injustice without looking away, from ourselves or each other. Yet it’s important that these poems also enact joy, play, and gratitude. I want my nieces to see aloha as intergenerational action.

How do you approach performing your poems? How does performance amplify the written word? 

Performance is a vital part of my practice. I’m lucky to be part of a close-knit creative community here on Oʻahu. During the pandemic, it was nourishing to lean on each other and share how much we missed performing for live audiences and talk each other through how dramatically our writing rituals changed. For my book launch in September, the entire lineup was chosen family, and one wahine in the audience came up to me after and said it felt like she got to watch best friends fall in love with each other. High praise indeed.

I’m always thinking of different ways to share poetry in public. Lehua Taitano blew my mind one year at AWP—she cracked the world open for me as a performer. For some years now, Jocelyn Ng and I have been building toward a project that is part art installation, part immersive spoken word. I also want to figure out how to afford feeding audiences every time I share my work. It may seem like a small thing but when people are able to share  good food, good drinks, and good story, intimacy deepens.

In an interview with The Rumpus, you said, “Words have legs. I like thinking that those who know ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi are able to follow those legs into a part of the poem that is just for them. And that part of the poem is just as active as any other part because people who can enter there can talk shit with me, commemorate with me, sing the song with me, even call me out on something missing or out of place.” Do you write with an intended audience in mind? 

Yesterday was our Lā Kūʻokoʻa, our Hawaiian Independence Day, and in the early hours of that same day, Maunaloa erupted! We call this a hōʻailona, or a sign in this case of great change to come. Hulihia. When lava flows, it's a good time to reflect on the changes we’ve made in life and what we want to grow moving forward. It feels appropriate to talk about audience as lava makes its way to the ocean on Hawaiʻi island. My ʻāina, my lāhui, my kūpuna, my ʻohana, they are always with me when I write. And I don’t feel it as a burden; it is a responsibility and privilege. I want to write to them, for them. Ask the Brindled is my humble way of reaching out to other Indigenous women, especially ʻŌiwi wahine and women who fall in love and choose to build family with other women. The book is also a love letter to survivors and shapeshifters.

Thank you for taking the time to speak with me and for such stunning answers. Lastly, as a professor, how do you teach poetry as a resistive and reclamatory force? 

My students and I talk about poetry and ea, or breath. Ea also signifies rising and sovereignty in my language. What do we give our ea to? How do we earn the ea of our readers? How do we bring our bodies to meet and metabolize the poems we write?  Poetry should be part of the body, and our bodies are here on purpose. My ancestors worked hard to make sure I’d be here, with you, with my communities, with every reader who chooses to make story with me. We are here on purpose.

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​While his work has a clear figurative language, the large-scale paintings of Juan Miguel Palacios contain a strong conceptual load, where his work developed in series, and has a constant wandering of the individual's identity and its relationship with the environment. Concepts such as mourning, duel, luxury, restlessness, and inequality are constants vital in his work. Juan Miguel Palacios continually explores the complex range of human emotions with a free, powerful, and always modern technique. He is driven by the search for new forms of expression and fuses sociopolitical themes with personal experiences and historical antecedents of art, creating a unique and modern environment on the most outstanding and controversial issues of contemporary society. Canvas, vinyl, methacrylate, aluminum, and drywall are surfaces where Juan Miguel Palacios presents his shocking and extensive work.

Born in Madrid in 1973, Juan Miguel Palacios begins to paint at the early age of 6 years. After a long journey with many art professors and Fine Art schools, at age 12, he joined the studio of the renowned Spanish painter Amadeo Roca Gisbert (disciple of Joaquin Sorolla) for six years. Along those years, he was educated and formed in a strict academic training until he joined the Faculty of Fine Arts in Madrid in 1991. When he had completed his college degree, in 1997, he founded the Laocoonte Art School of Madrid. During this period, he combined mentoring and teaching with the development of his artist career. Currently, he resides in NY since 2013, showing his work around the world.

The image of the pig is a common theme throughout your work. Where did this interest stem from? 

In general, the theme of animals has been quite recurrent in my work, always as metaphors of what I want to express. For example, for many years I worked with the image of a hyena as a symbol of oppression within an increasingly unequal society. This has been a central theme of my work for the last few years.

On this occasion, for the development of the new series "Un final feliz,"  the pig seemed to me the perfect figure for the new narrative that I wanted to present. The pig is an animal that has been present in all cultures. It is loaded with strong symbolism, loved and revered by some and hated by others. An animal that pleases and amuses us but at the same time we dislike and disgust it. In Spain, where I am originally from, it is present in all our gastronomy, which we consider delicious but, at the same time, it is always present in our insults. That duality and contradiction itself is what really interested me in addition to its great visual load.

Texture plays a role in many of your pieces, adding dimension and depth. How is texture important to your practice and how do you go about choosing a certain medium for a piece? 

Texture plays a very important role in my work. For me, it is another fundamental element in the practice of painting, just like color. I cannot conceive a piece of art without color even if texture is absent. Whether the texture of a piece is flat or smooth is intentional. 

As you were saying, in many of my paintings I not only use texture to create dimension and depth, but also to create narratives that I cannot achieve by just drawing or painting in a conventional way. For example, texture can generate optical illusions that confuse the viewer and force a more careful look.

In this way, the materials and mediums that I choose for my works play a very important role. For example, for my "Wounds" series, the use of drywall to create broken wall effects was vital. Fundamentally, this series talks about inequality. In my opinion, women have suffered the greatest injustice and inequality in the history of humanity. In such a manner, I was creating female faces that had been or were being assaulted. I was painting on a first layer of transparent vinyl and then superimposed on a second layer of broken drywall. The broken parts of the wall represented the scratches and wounds produced by the aggression. In a metaphorical way, I wanted to create an analogy between the wall and the woman. Something so hard, strong and resistant, but subjected to constant aggression ends up breaking. The drywall became a key part of this series.

The combination of lightness and cleanliness of the transparent vinyl with the roughness and hardness and depth generated by the broken drywall, like the combination of something more illusory such as the paint strokes and the realism of the pieces of the broken wall create a confusing effect on the viewer at first glance. Something that was very attractive to me as they were such strong and evident images. In short, depending on what I want to tell and express, I use different materials.

I found the use of negative space in Assaults so compelling. Can you speak about the process behind and the interaction between those works?

Something that always interests me to do in my work is transferring a concept I want to communicate into a form of representation. For example, if I'm talking about the concept of aggression or abuse, I will try to carry this abuse or aggression by hammering and burning the wall, throwing turpentine on the canvas, scratching the paint, or removing it with paint remover.

For these works, I used transparent vinyls as the surface and synthetic enamels as the medium. Enamel, an oil-based paint, dries faster than oil paint. So by the time the painting was done, between 30 minutes and an hour later, the first sketch lines were already practically dry.  By throwing the solvent to deform the paint, I was removing much of the paint except for those first preparatory lines that were almost dry, thus leaving large empty spaces. That concept of absence was really interesting for my discourse because every time that there is an aggression, there is an empty space. A fissure impossible to fill. Something that was, and will never be again.

You depict a variety of faces and personalities, especially in The Wanderers and Emociones. Where do you find your subject matter?  

The topics that I work on are usually based on what I am living or thinking at every moment. The things that worry and concern me or the issues that I want to denounce. My daily walks and especially my train commute to the studio are usually moments of reflection and inspiration for all the thoughts I wanna communicate. 

The New York subway is that magical place where everything is possible. You can practically find all kinds of social classes and cultures in a very small space. When I arrived in NY, I remember being utterly in love and enraptured by everything—every single image I saw, each aspect and scene. But above all, of every single person and the immense diversity of them.

The richness of this scenario itself was presented to me with splendid beauty. But as time passed, with a further and deeper look, behind that superficial beauty, I started to notice the loneliness behind it. Gazes of sadness and melancholy, faces with no expression. They represented a kind of theatrical stage full of wanderers in the kingdom of heaven. New York is a city that welcomes hundreds of thousands of people, attracted by its splendor and wealth, every year with the sole objective of having a better life or success. But as everyone knows, it is a very tough city. A city in which everyone arrives with great energy; but as time goes by, the city wipes out and frustrates illusions, generating wanderers trapped in a lonely city. This type of appreciation was, for example, the origin of the Wanderers series.

What an empathetic and tender origin story—I feel so similarly to your depiction of New York. Your artwork is humongous! What is it like in the studio working with such large-scaled work? 

Working at a large scale is what I love the most and where I really find myself. The physical act of painting becomes movement and dance. My thoughts move at the same rhythm as my body and they both connect with my deepest emotions. It's where everything is fast and the paint falls off. Drips and spills get everything stained and the studio itself becomes an extension of the paintings themselves. Hazard is part of the creative process in the most remarkable way. In short, it is where the walls of my studio exude happiness. 

The problem with large and heavy formats is that your body pays a toll and it wears and tears over time. I am still recovering from my third major spinal surgery.

What are you currently working on? 

The last series that I worked on before undergoing my last back surgery was Un final feliz, a series of works that were more fresh and fun. 

It was a social and political critique, especially of the American culture, sarcastically tinted with ironic overtones since everything revolves around the iconography of two pigs procreating at the foot of a collapsing town. The series is much more colorful than the previous series and has a greater tendency of abstraction, which is where I am heading at the moment.

Precisely at this very moment, I'm moving my studio to a bigger place after 10 years in the same location since I moved to NY, which symbolically represents a big change for me that I hope will also be reflected in my work. I have the feeling that great things are gonna happen there. Stay tuned.

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​Lucy Zhang writes, codes, and watches anime. Her work has appeared in The Molotov Cocktail, Interzone, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of the chapbooks HOLLOWED (Thirty West Publishing, 2022) and ABSORPTION (Harbor Review, 2022). Find her at https://kowaretasekai.wordpress.com/ or on Twitter @Dango_Ramen.

The first piece of yours I came across was "Money Baby," where the writing, reading, coding, and sound effects come together so ingeniously. How did "Money Baby" develop and how did you realize writing and coding could form such a perfect union? 

“Money Baby” was actually part of a series of different pieces (many of them interactive) I did inspired by children or babies in non-human forms, so I guess I was already on a roll. The editors of Superstition Review told me I could do something creative with the recording, so it was their prompting that sparked the idea with the coin rattling audio. Ultimately though, I just wanted to explore money as a means of defining worth, livelihood, family, and nurturing. 

In terms of writing and coding, I had always been interested in generative art and would often code interactive visuals—visualizing music, playing with ARKit, etc. I decided “why does it just have to be art? Can’t it be writing too?”—probably because I was tired of whatever story I was working on that day and wanted a break. Fun things come from procrastination.

That’s amazing! I wish such fun ideas came from my procrastination. Your interactive/digital work is simply so brilliant. I especially love “Heat death didn’t stop us from being shut-ins,” “Saplings,” and “Backspace.” How did these ideas originate, especially since they’re all so distinct and individual? 

I think the more I want to procrastinate, the more interesting my creative work becomes…which is not so good for all the tasks I’ve yet to complete. :P I wrote/coded all three of those pieces during the “height” of the pandemic, when everyone was still quarantining. It certainly felt like a rather apocalyptic, introspective time. “Heat death didn’t stop us from being shut-ins” and “Backspace” evolved from too much introspection as well as my adjacent novel research surrounding space, the universe, and physics. “Sapling” was part of that series of pieces I did on non human babies (in the same line of thinking as “Money Baby”, “Neuron”, etc.). I think “Sapling” originated from me just wanting to implement plants that grew using the JavaScript Canvas API. I really wasn’t thinking about any text or story or message at that point, hah! For most of these pieces, I explored and discovered and developed the content as I built the actual thing, so it’s hard to really pinpoint an origination beyond “hey Lucy is thinking again.”

How do you maintain a writing schedule while also working as a software engineer? Does your day job influence your writing?

I’m not sure I can call it a schedule. If I don’t write frequently enough, I begin to feel this growing sense of dread that doesn’t go away unless I pound out two to three thousand words (or so). This happens about once a week. Work has gotten rather busy lately which means less time for writing, so I’ve been feeling that dread more frequently. Can I call this Dread-Driven Writing? DDW? Maybe if you ask me six months from now, I’d have a different answer, but right now, work life is on fire which means writing life is also on fire (metaphorically). The influences from my day job are pretty straightforward: I like to write about technical things, engineers, robots. Sometimes these influences manifest in different ways, but ultimately it all comes down to expressing the geek inside. 

Thank you for that honesty, Lucy. I feel the same dread. I love your project I CAN SEE YOU WRITE. Can you take me through the process of collaborating with another writer? 

The process is actually quite simple! Sometimes the writer will already have an idea for something interactive, but they aren't certain what's quite possible, or maybe they have no idea beyond an inkling of potential for a certain piece. They'll send me the piece in text form, and I'll run off with my creative liberties. I'll do a lot of experimentation and have anywhere from a 50% complete to a 99% complete project. Then I'll send over an implementation of what I have with any open questions. From there, we'll iterate. 

Congrats on Hollowed and Absorption! Two chapbooks in a year! How does it feel? 

I’m honored that Thirty West Publishing and Harbor Review had faith in my works and published them. It’s also a very nice feeling to see my friends who don’t care much at all about literature holding copies of my chapbook. Also, prior to the chapbooks, I never put much time into collecting all of my individual pieces, so with these publications, I have a new-ish interest in actually doing something with once write-and-forget-about stories 😆

I’m curious if Hollowed and Absorption were created with each other in mind. You use the word “hollow” or “hollowed” in the pieces “Jiaozi,” “The Carriage Became A Pie,” and “Teach Me All There Is to Know” in Absorption.  

They weren’t! I don’t think that far ahead in life, hah. I think that’s more a result of me gravitating toward similar themes and emotions.

:) Absorption contains a lot of scientific word choice. Can you speak about this decision to employ detailed scientific language to discuss themes of life and death? 

I often find it relieving to look at abstract concepts in extremely clinical terms. When I approach heavy topics from a more scientific lens, I start fixating on the engineering bits of how something works. It's easier for me to visualize and get excited about something that I know will have an answer if I look deeply enough as opposed to something as nebulous as death.
 
Going back to your project I CAN SEE YOU WRITE, I love that you wrote “The sky and JavaScript is the limit.” What’s next for you? How do you see yourself continuing to push the limit of interactive and interdisciplinary art? 

I've been working with some folks on new projects but those have been taking their sweet time because the salary-earning job has begun to leave me with negative energy levels at the end of the day. That being said, I have ideas and really want to work on more long running projects connected by a theme of some sort. Maybe I'll get hacking away again during Thanksgiving break :)

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​Young Joo Lee is a multimedia artist from South Korea, currently living and working in Cambridge, MA and Los Angeles. Lee holds an MFA in Sculpture at Yale University (2017) and a Meisterschueler degree in Film at the Academy of Fine Arts Städelschule Frankfurt (2013).
 
In her recent moving image works, Lee's personal narratives as an immigrant, South Korean, and a woman interweave with the current and historical narratives to investigate the issues of alienation, discrimination, and mental illness in late capitalist society. 
 
Lee’s works have been exhibited at the Alternative Space Loop- Seoul, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art- Seoul, The Drawing Center-New York, Museum of Modern Art, Zollamt - Frankfurt, Curitiba Biennial, and GLAS animation festival, among others. Lee completed several artist residencies including Macdowell (US), Sanskriti Foundation (India), MeetFactory (Czech Republic), and Incheon Art Platform (South Korea). She is currently a Harvard Film Study Center fellow She currently is a Visiting Lecturer in Animation and Immersive Media Art at the Department of Art, Film and Visual Studies at Harvard University. She was a College Fellow in Media Practice at Harvard University (2018-20), a Fulbright Scholar in Film & Digital Media (2015-18) and a recipient of DAAD artist scholarship (2010-12). Her work is represented by Ochi Projects, Los Angeles. 

What I find really unique about your work is that you explore many mediums like drawing, painting, print, sculpture, installation, and video in a very balanced and cohesive way. In my experience as an artist, I’ve always felt a pressure to find a niche and stick with it, but you’ve successfully cultivated art in all of your desired mediums. Why do you choose to create in a range of forms and when did you understand you didn’t have to confine yourself to a single artistic practice? 

I have always loved making things in a lot of different ways. Especially right now, as I'm visiting my parents, there are little traces of that around the house—little storybooks that I would create and little fragments of songs. I always liked making a lot of things, but I didn't know that that was a path until I went to college and started learning about conceptual art. It was very exciting for me as a young person to see so many different artists use different media and underscore the material or the interaction with viewers. 

I've continued from there, developing ways to understand my own working in different media. On the one hand, it is kind of an outgrowth of whatever my expressive tendencies or intuition are at the moment—if I just feel like writing a song or making a drawing. But then, of course, I think about the viewer in the space. Using different media is a way for me to sculpt the experience of a space as a whole. I always think first and foremost about the space and about the interaction between the viewer and my work, which guides how I work in different media. It's also just dependent upon, as someone who works in performance and video, the way that different opportunities or collaborations come, which is slightly different than working in sculpture and working in painting. Some of it is dependent upon who I'm working with at the time and what ideas I have in my head for what's coming up next. Generally, as I'm working on a current body of work, I'm thinking about the ones that I want to make after that, and how I can already build in those connections as I'm working on the current body of work.

Do your procedures for two and three-dimensional work differ from video or performance work? Do you have a preference working in a certain medium? 

I don't think I have a preference. Each medium has its own chemistry, its own sort of recipe. There's definitely a big difference working two-dimensionally compared to three-dimensionally. But as much as possible, I try to translate the same kind of affective mood that I have in my performance or video work into my two-dimensional work. When I'm writing something with characters, there's already so many different character voices and narratives in my head.

Writing is a huge part of my practice and cuts through everything. A lot of the drawings and paintings I've made are text-based. My favorite process to work the most in is music because the way music guides me through it. Audio really clicks with my brain, so I love to write music and work with other musicians. The most fun part of my process is when I get to collaborate with other musicians. Speaking musical language is very magical. 

Video editing is also my favorite. I love the precision of it, but it can be very maddening. The result of a video is so gratifying because you can show a video anywhere. Each medium has its highs and its lows. For example, sculptures are so fun, but sculptures have a totally different life as a physical object. In comparison, time-based media doesn’t even exist until they're actually happening. 

Speaking about editing, is editing something you had to self-learn? 

I've had some teachers—the teacher who taught me the most about editing was Johannes DeYoung. But editing-wise, I've just edited for a long time and followed my sensibilities. Whenever I'm watching movies or television, I’m taking in everything, from the cuts, the cues, the setting. Over time, I'll return to certain compositions in editing. I tend to think about editing in terms of painting or collage. 

That’s so interesting to think about editing as collaging. I loved the storytelling and satire in Communication and I’m so amazed that it’s a one-woman show. Can you walk me through the process of creating that piece?

Sometimes I start a performance piece with the costume before I write, but I’m not sure how Communication started. It's always hard to remember the beginning of something. I try to write scripts the same way that I write poetry, and then fit it into characters and develop some kind of plot. In this case, I knew I wanted to have a plot and I knew I wanted to be about communication. I think it started with that. The first section of the video is the characters sitting in the dark in the planetarium. The second kind of chapter is Wanda, the director of the planetarium and the third one is the character who's loosely based off of me, having a conversation on the phone.

The phone call is about a relationship that I had been in. And I was like, how do I process this relationship without it being directly about my relationship, because the relationship was like too much for me to process. That’s a strategy I sometimes use—fictionalizing my real life into a story. It also might have started with that monologue or that I knew I wanted a character to be named Aspen vendor boss. 

My practice is very interdisciplinary, coming from all angles. I generate ideas from movement, from a costume, from sound. A monologue is pulling them together. 

I do think of my writing as being more related to poetry—the way I write is really based on sound, rhythm, and beats. A character or a plot point is a beat. I'm trying my best to write something that's coherent but there's always that part of me that is wanting to try different angles because inspiration keeps coming. 

Was Communication self-directed and self-filmed? 

It was self directed, but I worked with Joe Short and Andrew Gitchel at Harvard. Joe was filming me and Andrew was doing the lights. They also built the set pieces. But I wrote everything. I’ve done other projects where other people are performing and I really like to work that way as well. But at that time, when I was creating Communication, it was the first body of work that I had made after quarantine. I wasn't in a place to work with a lot of people.

I felt like I really needed to kind of play around and do something that was loose, because when you're filming yourself and writing for yourself, you know exactly what you have to do, because you’re the performer. I know that if I'm the one who's performing it, I have no problem with doing 20 takes or trying 10 different versions. I have the freedom to be more flexible and experimental. If I have an idea or want to change the script, I don’t have to explain everything to others. That's the beauty of working solo.

I’m enthralled in the very idiosyncratic storytelling that characterizes your video and performance work. Where do you find inspiration for these stories? 

I have so many sources of inspiration that it's hard to name a single one. I'm constantly watching TV shows—whether at my own house, or at somebody else's house, or even at the gas station. I love reading books and finding things on Pinterest. I take a lot from everything and my art is what comes out of it. 

In terms of video, I'm really inspired by a lot of comedy films by Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy in the 80s. Those films weren’t only funny, but contained political commentary. I think, especially in the 80s, there was a critique of corporate culture. The films of that era are really influential to me in terms of how I think about the stories I'm telling and how I want them to register to an audience. 

Another one of my greatest influences is Tracey Ullman, who had a sketch comedy show where she dressed up as different characters, some of whom people would now consider very problematic, but back in the 90s, we didn't even have the word problematic. Anna Deavere Smith’s work is also super influential to me. She is known for taking on different characters, generally characters people dislike, and reenacting their actions. Stew’s musical Passing Strange also really influenced me, inspiring Foccaciatown. 

Most of my influences are in TV and film, but I’m also inspired by certain stage performers who are more experimental. 

You frequently incorporate acting or music into your artwork. Do you have acting or music education? 

I actually am not formally trained in music, but I’be written and performed many songs. I did have acting training throughout my life, mostly in clown. 

Clown comes out of commedia dell'arte, which is Italian. And then all of the clown teachers that I have have come out of a they are from a pier goalie, a branch of clowning. 

Clown is a performance approach that is about playing with the audience. Rather than playing to the audience, the clown plays with the audience. Sometimes you wear a red nose or a costume, but a lot of times you don't. It's really about finding very universal and existential humor about life's highly profound and dramatic moments.

In contrast to Communication, in Animal Static, you worked with a cast of actors. What was directing that like? 

It was really, really fun. I’m actually editing another collaborative project called Glass Eye, which I started in 2020. It's so fun working with other performers and with friends. For the Inside Room, I also worked with friends and other participants in the Recess Arts program. It's fun to write something and then just see what people do with it and how they improvise. Increasingly, I enjoy that more than performing myself. There are times when I really like to perform, but when it comes to the camera, I really have fun being behind the camera.

You also host a podcast, 1-800-Powers! What prompted you to begin this podcast, what do you hope to accomplish with it, and where do you see it moving in the future? 

I started my podcast for so many reasons. I think first and foremost, because I really missed the performances that I was doing where I could talk to and with the audience. With COVID, the frequency and the length of my performances changed and I wanted some way to work that muscle and also practice writing. 

I just released the first episode with guest Delali Ayivor. It's a great way to have conversations with people who I respect and admire and share those conversations. I love working in audio and storytelling so much. 

I don't want to say too much because I don't want to jinx myself or anything. In the future, I would love to have more guests and to incorporate a variety show format. I would love to have syndicated segments on it, where somebody else would produce their own segment which becomes part of the episode. 

Eventually, in my life, I'd love to have a TV show. I have a lifelong desire to enter the world of television. Having a podcast is also a way for me to write episodes and just kind of finesse the format. 

But for this first year, I told myself to just see where it goes. It doesn't matter how long it takes me and it doesn’t have to be perfect. Whatever happens happens. It’s been great. I also love that podcasts are something that can be shared and listened to in the future, so I think about it as this addendum to my practice.

That's so exciting! I hope you get a TV show. I love what you said in your conversation with Audra Wist back in 2015— “love as the essence of the universe, which is beautiful, but not peaceful. Each person is a universe, and you have to come to an understanding. Maybe real love is unexpectedly coming to the same definition of what love is.” You also read a beautiful passage from all about love by bell hooks in a podcast episode. Has your definition of love changed in the past years? How does love influence your work? 

I think I would still agree with that quote. I don't know if my understanding of love has changed. I think my relationship to love and my expectations of the type of love that I encounter with others has shifted. During the pandemic, there was a very intense time of intimacy, whether that was feeling extremely isolated or becoming closer with people in your life. I don't think of love as a primal motivating force in my work as much as I used to. I’m still sharing my universal love with the audience when I’m performing—it's not that I've become cynical or jaded or something. 

Love is still in my work, but I became a lot more interested in craft and focused on the practical side of love. Love to me is more action-based than thought-based. 

I really feel like I'm in a zone of action. My core values are still the same. I still want people to feel magic and feel transported and transcendental through my work. Through personal experiences, I have more experiential knowledge of the boundaries of love. But then, love, it's never-changing. It's never going to go away, especially between some of my friends who are such amazing friends. I’ve been thinking and feeling more about friendship, which to me is the ultimate love. To be able to be friends with your family or to also be able to be friends with somebody you love romantically is very important. Love shows up in projects like Animal Static, where I work with friends. 

Lastly, I have to ask about your books, Consciousness and My Wet Hot Drone Summer, which I feel are so distinct from one another. I’m fascinated by how Consciousness transcends form and tradition. Why did you decide to culminate your work into a book? Are you looking to publish more books in the future? 

Definitely! I have so many ideas. For Consciousness, Be Oakley, who runs GenderFail, a small publishing house contacted me and the book grew from there. It seemed like the right time. I had been working in a certain way and didn't have a documentation of my songs and projects. The book seemed like a great way to do that because the amazing thing about books is that they travel around the world. People would take photos of my books and send them to me. It’s also such a treat to do readings. I love working in books and text. There’s a couple of books that I want to write, but I just have to sit down and write them. 


​

Your poems are immensely fun and so different from the overwhelmingly archaic poetry that is taught in school classrooms. When did you realize that poetry can be more than traditional writing about serious subject matters and can exist outside of print form? 

Thanks so much for the compliment—that means a lot! It's an interesting question. Working in visual and hybrid forms has always felt, for me, like a way to express my frustration with traditional structures. I think the first time I intentionally wrote a visual poem was in sixth grade. My English teacher had asked our class to write and curate a portfolio of ten poems. By curate, I think she actually meant we should type them up and print them out in a nice font. But it was the end of the school year and I was sick of Microsoft Word and following instructions. The teacher hadn't requested a particular format for our poems, so I gathered broken objects from around my family's apartment—bent eyeglasses, an ancient Nokia cell phone, an old wooden clock—and wrote poems on them in Sharpie. Instead of a report, I handed my teacher a large plastic bag full of sculptures. To my utter surprise, my teacher said the poems were "unique" and did not send me to detention.
 
Ten years later, I started my MFA at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. I was going through a period of creative flux, and wasn't sure what kinds of poems I wanted to be writing. Everything I put on the page felt wrong, so I would revise my poems until there was practically no substance left. All of my poems were very short and no one could make any sense of them, not even me. One night, frustrated during an especially challenging revision, I printed out a copy of my poem and deep-fried it on the stove. I took a photograph of this deep-fried poem and submitted it, with no explanation, to that week's workshop packet. Even though I was an adult in an MFA program at that point, I was still a little surprised when I didn't get in any trouble. After that, something broke open for me. I stopped being so afraid of what other people thought of me, and I began to recognize poetry as something that could be physical.

Thank you for sharing that, Nora. The story with your English teacher is so endearing. Is that deep-fried poem part of the ones that appeared in phoebe? You titled them “Deep Friend Poem #63” and “Deep Fried Poem #64.” Did you create a series of deep-fried poems? If so, are there sixty-plus more? 

There are so, so many more—in all, I've deep-fried many hundreds of poems at this point. I have found that like any poem-writing, it's necessary to deep-fry poems in bulk. I am working on a book of full-color photographs of deep-fried poems. In assembling it, I've had to fry far more poems than I have ultimately ended up with. I've found that only half of the poems I deep-fry turn into objects worth recording or preserving, and of those, many break or decay before I can photograph them properly. Then, there are the deep-fried poems that look great in real life but just don't photograph well. It's a tricky business! 

Wow, that's amazing! I’m so captivated by the uniqueness and ingenuity of each of your works. Do you establish the form of a poem before or after it’s written? 

To me, the form of a poem is inextricable from its content. If the exterior shape of the poem changes, the language is altered too—either because I have to change the words to fit the particularities of the new shape, or else because their new orientation changes the way they look, sound, and feel. 

I often shift my poems’ physical shapes as part of my process of revision, because it helps me understand and adjust the ways the words are working together. I don’t think of a poem as finished until I find its final shape. 

How do you decide if a piece will be visual? Do you approach visual versus non-visual work differently? 

That’s an interesting question. I think there's an artificial line between the idea of a visual poem and a "non-visual" one. At the end of the day, all poems that are written for the page have shapes and forms we can see. Even if a poet thinks they're making few visual choices in their writing, there's inherent visual work just in placing a poem on a page—patterning of letters, the places we break lines, the fonts we use, the punctuation, the capitalization, caesura. For performance poetry, slam poetry, sound poetry, and other forms that involve the human voice, there's a physicality to that too: sound waves are physical shapes that we create and share with our bodies. 

That being said, as much as the delineation between visual and non-visual poetry feels arbitrary, it is (like many delineations) nonetheless real in its consequences: there are poems people would call visual art and there are poems people would call "regular poems" and there are things people would call "music" and these things get treated very differently by artists and by poets. The work I make often falls into a muddy category—too cross-disciplinary to be considered "real poetry," but too rooted in language to be considered "real art." 

I don't really care what my work gets called. Personally, I call all of my works poems, and I approach all of my poems in much the same way: I write something in a shape meant to communicate something. Sometimes a poem begins as a drawing in a notebook, or a screenshot on my phone. Sometimes the visual aspects creep in later, in revision, as I get to know my poem and what it wants a little better. 

There are, of course, differences between different writing processes. For instance, I recently wrote a poem with a sharpie on the surface of a lava lamp's glass, the text wending around the bottle in a spiral. Unlike a poem typed on a computer, the poem I wrote was not one it would be possible to revise later: it was permanent and thus frozen in time. Reading it requires a more physical action than a poem printed on a page or a screen: the reader has to walk around the lava lamp in a circle in order to read the text in "order."

The lava lamp poem sounds brilliant—since it’s three-dimensional, how do you intend it to be exhibited? Would printing it in a traditional literary journal do it justice? I’m also wondering if you have a background in visual arts or design because you frequently play with font and form in your work.

Thank you! It was a lot of fun to make. There's something that feels almost wrong about writing on a lava lamp, and I think that’s what gives the process its power. I have taken art classes on and off over the years but don’t have much formal training—at least none that would teach me to do the sort of work I do. Instead, I’ve learned by doing, and by asking the visual artists in my life for advice when I want to do something I don’t know how to. 

As far as publishing goes, it’s a complicated question. I had the opportunity to show the lava lamp in an art show recently. Art shows or in-person events often become the avenue for works like lava lamp poems or deep-fried poems, because it gives people a chance to fully experience the piece as a material object. On the other hand, if a poem can only be read in-person, it changes the work because it changes the work’s audience. Lit mags, especially online ones, expand access.

I recently became Editor-in-Chief of Ghost Proposal, a journal and chapbook press. Our editorial team is working hard to make dimensional, visual, and multidisciplinary poetry more available to a wider audience.

Congrats on becoming Editor-in-Chief of Ghost Proposal! How has leading the journal been and where do you envision it going? 

Thank you! It's been an exciting journey. I first connected with Ghost Proposal when they published my chapbook LULL in 2020. I was deeply grateful to get to work with a press that valued experimental and visual work, and fell in love with their past chapbook catalog and issues. So when the former editors decided to pursue other projects and asked me if I'd like to take over as Editor-in-Chief, of course I said yes! 
 
I am joined by two incredible co-editors, Alyssa Moore and Kelly Clare. We're dedicated to furthering Ghost Proposal's mission of publishing cross-disciplinary work that resists categorization by form and genre. We're especially interested in work that sits at the intersection of poetry and visual art. We recently launched the Ultraslant Prize, an annual award for one work of visual poetry; each year, the winning poem will be printed as a pamphlet. There aren't many prizes for this type of work and it's been incredible to be in the position to create opportunities. 

I'm so happy about the work Ghost Proposal does to uplift visual poetry. You also directed a film, Egg Cream! How did you get into directing? Do you see yourself creating more films in the future?

Egg Cream was a film that I made in collaboration with my dad Peter Miller, who is a documentary filmmaker. We started filming when I was eleven years old and finished it over a decade later. The project began, as most things do, with a question: I wanted to know the story behind the chocolate egg cream, a soda drink that is said to have originated among Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Despite its name, the egg cream contains neither eggs nor cream—just milk, chocolate syrup, and seltzer.

To better understand the origins and significance of the egg cream, my dad and I took his video camera and wandered New York City, where we lived, trying as many egg creams as we could. We interviewed deli workers, food historians, relatives, and even my Hebrew school teacher. When I was thirteen or so, we put the project on hold, and the tapes sat forgotten in a box for about a decade. When I was in graduate school, we uncovered them and, with the help of the extraordinary film editor Amy Linton, we finally finished the film. 

Though documentary is not my usual medium, I realized, working on Egg Cream, that the process of telling a story—the inquiry, the conversations, the research, the stitching together—is very similar from one medium to another. As a writer, I love studying films as much as I loved making them—I'm drawn to how a film can weave together elements of image, language, and sound all at once. I think poets can learn a lot from watching (and making) movies.

​

 '​Andrea Hasler was born in 1975 in Zürich, Switzerland, and currently lives and works in London, UK. She holds an MA Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art & Design. Her wax and mixed media sculptures are characterized by a tension between attraction and repulsion. Her work depicts the emotional body, often working with skin as the physical element that divides the Self from the other, as well as the potential container for both and what happens if you open up those boundaries. Hasler’s work dissects moral ideas generated by the media and deeply entrenched concepts in our society without reassembling the dissected, separated and ornamented pieces into a new or different whole--thus confronts the viewer with his or her own feelings of attraction and repulsion.

Solo projects include ‘Burdens of Excess’ Gusford Los Angeles/USA, Irreducible Complexity’ NextLevel-Projects, London/UK and ‚Full fat or semi-skinned?’ Bon Gallery, Stockholm/Sweden. Hasler won the 2014 Arts Council England funded Greenham Common Commission and created a large site specific installation which gained much press interest. Hasler chairs artist talks at Next Level-Projects, lectures at various institutions including the Sotheby's Institute of Art.

In 2018, her work was include in the exhibition ‘Ethics, Excess and Extinction’ at El Paso Museum, Texas/USA. She was an ‘Artist-Resident’ at ‘Verbier 3D Foundation’, Verbier, Switzerland, where she created two sculptures for their Alpine Sculpture Park, she completed other artist-residency at Next Level Projects/Bahahmas and at Chisenhale, London/UK. In 2019, Andrea Hasler created a new body of work during her artist-residency at 'Verbier 3D Time + Space' in New York , which resulted in a solo show at

'Verbier 3D Foundation’s' new project space in Soho/New York City/US. Most recent projects include the group show 'Raum der Lusten' at Raum, Utrecht/NL together with Atelier van Lieshaut and Maarten Baas and 'Body-Works'  a site specific installation with 'Wie wars mal mit' in Basel/Switzerland and Tagazout/Morocco in April 2022. Future projects include a site-specific installation in Marfa, Texas planned for Autumn 2023.

Your art is marked by dichotomy—by the collaboration between enticement and disgust, luxury and grotesque. How did you develop your current style of wax sculptures? 

My practice centers around depictions of the emotional body—that which is not defined by the physical body but rather captures emotions—and I construct immersive installations and site-specific sculptures that are characterized by a tension between attraction and repulsion, something that can be aesthetically desirable yet revolting at the same time.

Focusing on the psychological need to belong and emotional links to the “abject,” my work confronts viewers with their own corporeality. My interest lies in exploring the boundary between the Self and the “Other” (and how blurry that has become in our social-media-obsessed world), focusing on the skin as the physical element that segregates the two as well as the potential container for both. My work plays with visions of the future, scenes of surgical fetishes and glamor and unsettle the viewer with carefully staged and naturalistic wax reproductions of human organs in the form of luxury fetishes. The viewer is confronted with contradictions where desire and attraction are hovering back and forth to disgust and repulsion.

A long-term subject in my work is the notion of our obsession with luxury, particularly
luxury-travel in contrast to global migration. Why do we travel, what are we seeking, how do we portray this “Other”, and which “tribe” do we aspire to belong to? My work poses new questions in relation to the craze for luxury and status: How much can our bodies take? Will we sacrifice everything for beauty? What kind of person do you wish to be tomorrow? How much money will we spend to maintain our carefully curated and “filtered” version of ourselves?

I honestly think that one day, it will not be the Rolex on your wrist that will be the ultimate luxury accessory, but kidneys embellished with diamonds. As soon as the exterior has been completely molded, plastic surgery of an internal organ is its logical consequence. This is the peak of the exclusive: The intervention is not visible--or only so on an x-ray! I live in a nomadic society, and I think the brands we choose are a reflection of the "tribe" we want to belong to. More importantly, they help us to become identified by other nomads, to become part of a group. This notion is driven by a sense of desperately wanting to belong that the philosopher Julia Kristeva links with our desire to recreate the symbiotic mother-infant relationship which stems from the consequent tragedy of the sense of loss when one realizes that they are an independent subject. So really, to put it simple: I think the craze for luxury is a longing for one’s nurturing mother.

That’s such a fascinating way to think about the luxury craze. How did your interest in the body and luxury first develop? How did your art education play a role in supporting these interests? 

Growing up in Switzerland, famous for its understated take on everything, I was not prepared for the brashness and logo obsession in relation to luxury goods that I encountered when moving to London to study Fine Art. Long limited-edition waiting lists and queuing around the block for a pair of shoes were all new to me. So initially, my long-term project Burdens of Excess started by analyzing my own growing obsession with these items and by analyzing the emotional process of purchasing these goods. I became fascinated with the psychological aspect of consumerism, and its emotional link to “abject,” something that is aesthetically desirable, yet revolting: where the viewer’s attraction is replaced by repulsion.

The accessories I deconstruct in Burdens of Excess are all items that I desire as a consumer myself. I lust after them for months and then I cut them up in the most cathartic way. My scarification of personal items started as an art student, as I simply didn’t have the budget to invest in new "material," so I would sit in my flat, look around and wonder what I could "sacrifice" next. The sacrifice element has by now turned into part of the process, the lusting and waiting for a particular fashion item, the excitement of purchasing and then deconstructing it, which I often document. My work is not at all a critique of the luxury industry, it’s an attempt to analyze the emotions behind it, starting with my own.

In Burdens of Excess, I play with the aesthetic code of a chic, seductive luxury boutique setting with its black walls, glittery flooring and the way the organ objects are presented on plinths, hermetically sealed behind glass boxes. So in a paradox way, the deconstructed luxury items are back to where they belong. The subject matters of both the desire for luxury items as well as the darker side of plastic surgery’s intestine-liposuction filled accessories are both synonymous with what glamor/status represent for me—the desire to be accepted, to be part of the "tribe". Which brings us back to the "tribe" and the sense of so desperately wanting to belong. As certainties that used to shape the world around us are disappearing, I think hyperconsumerism has replaced religion in many ways. It gives people a sense of togetherness by displaying codes of where we ‘see’ ourselves associated with in an increasingly non-committal society that wants to leave all options open. Hyperconsumerism is fueled by brands, as we often form deep attachments to product brands, which affect people’s identity, and which pressure customers to buy and consume their goods. Another characteristic of hyperconsumerism is the constant pursuit of novelty, encouraging consumers to buy new and discard the old (no commitment required), particularly in fashion, where the product life cycle can be very short, sometimes just weeks. I believe that this endless cycle taps into an archaic feeling of emptiness with the hidden promise to gain a feeling of completeness with yet another purchase. It is built on selling an empty promise, that can not be fulfilled and only further fuels our desire for the next limited edition item in the hope that this will be the one that makes us feel at ease and secure in a world where many know certainties have split apart and become blurred lines. As I mentioned in the earlier question, in psychoanalysis, this triggered feeling relates to a child’s first painful realization that they are not part of a symbiotic cycle with their mother, the realization of ‘Self’ and ‘Other’. Julia Kristeva and I believe hyperconsumerism can be traced to fueling exactly this feeling, which I find incredibly fascinating.

All art, especially yours, elicits some sort of response from viewers. What is your relationship to how your artwork is received, especially when you rely on the emotions of disgust and appeal? Is it the artist’s responsibility to care how their work is received? 

Of course, I want people to engage with the work but I have no desire to have control over how people respond to the work and it is very interesting for me to witness people’s reactions. The reactions vary greatly—there are people who can’t look at these objects or feel nauseous. It’s fascinating how people are often repulsed by the abject quality of a sculpture, but also at the same time really want to touch it. It is that grey zone where desire and repulsion hover back and forth that I’m attempting to capture with my work.

You’ve also created gold medical instruments that are all distorted in some way. What was the inspiration behind them? Do you see yourself working in materials other than wax? 

The gold medical instruments series work with the notion of the foreign intrusive pain-inducing object that becomes the body itself as it blurs the lines between inside/outside of the body and Self & Other. I particularly looked at medical instruments that are used during childbirth and how to “emotionalize” these cold, stark metal objects in contrast to the soft fluid body they invade, such as forceps that were first developed in the 1600s and where the design remains largely the same. I gold dipped these sculptures to play on the notion of desire and luxury, so for example ‘The Bvlgari Edition Forceps’ are adorned with diamantes and a tiny little luxury brand logo.

Sometimes wax isn’t suitable for a specific commission, so I now often work with resin and incorporate less wax, or just an outer layer of wax.

Saying that, wax is still my favorite material to sculpt with—it allows for flexibility and there is never an endpoint, so a piece can “rest” for months before I warm it up to work on it again. Years later, I still enjoy the ritual element of melting wax: the slow process, building up layer after layer.​