new

ProMomme: a sex worker’s guide to parenting

 

Edition of 300
August 2024, English, 8 x 11 in, 72 pages, color, softcover
ORDER FROM (and Co-published by) Sming SmingCash Machine

What do erotic labor and child rearing have in common? How do these (normally unpaid) private practices inform one another? ProMomme: A Sex Worker’s Guide to Parenting is a poetic, honest, and practical look into the experiences of parents who work in the adult industry, challenging societal impulses to separate Madonna from Whore. Through essays, poems, interviews, and art, sixteen parents and sex workers share their wisdom, creativity, humor, and grit to reveal how their dual roles as “providers” overlap in complex ways, and how each role helps inform, strengthen, and poses challenges for the other. Inspired by the aesthetic of vintage parenting magazines, ProMomme offers guidance and companionship to SWers and civilians alike, touching on topics ranging from talking to one’s children about sex and sex work, to navigating postpartum bodily changes working in an industry of commodified desirability. ProMomme uplifts these personal experiences to destigmatize doing sex work as a parent to celebrate intimate labor in all its forms.

Design: Sophia Coleman

Contributors: Carmen of Angeles, Emme Witt-Eden, Frenchie Stoner, Gaby G., Honey de Vil, Julia SH, Lorde Destroyer, Lucy Khan, Piggy Lu, Princess Marx, Mari V, Maxine Holloway, and Yin Q

ProMomme was created in collaboration with Sex Workers Outreach Project Los Angeles (SWOPLA) as part of Kim Ye’s CA Creative Corps fellowship generously supported by the California Arts Council and administered by Community Partners.

A Costco Shopper Analysis

Inspired by the genres of stand-up comedy and the academic lecture, A Costco Shopper Analysis is a 50-minute performance in which the artist traverses the topics of food, fertility, and border control.  According to Business Insider, the typical Costco shopper is a 39 y/o Asian American married woman who has a 4-year degree or higher level of education, and makes over $125k/year. Donning a Kirkland wardrobe, Ye embodies this demographic and performs a personal analysis that connects Costco to family mythology, Chinese American history, US immigration policy, and Stanford University. Through this process, the artist uncovers one lineage behind the typical Costco shopper, and what it can tell us about the consumption of, and consumption by, Asian bodies in the United States. Watch the 4-minute cut of the performance documentation below or the longer 18-minute cut here.

This piece has been performed at the MOCA Geffen in Los Angeles and the Greenhouse Project at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Matrilineal Ambivalences

Matrilineal Ambivalences is a new performance by Multi-disciplinary artists and performers Young Joon Kwak and Kim Ye that continues their series of collaborative performances Rites of Matrilineal Dissent (2015 – ongoing). Kwak and Ye reprise their roles as “Baby Girl” and “Mommy,” enacting their dissent to harmful notions of womanhood and femininity, and emergence from the ruptures of motherhood, gender transition, migration, and the desire and pain that divide them from their lineage and the invalidations of their existence their own families.

The digitally mediated performance takes audiences through a journey of failure and discovery, of new selves and new bodies, and new forms of love and kinship as they use a cast of Ye’s pregnant torso worn by Kwak to further explore the materiality of queer, trans, and femme bodies as they give birth, live, die, decay, and question what the future holds. The performance takes on a participatory turn as Kwak and Ye cross the proscenium and into the space of the audience, activating the transition of passive viewers into active participants in the performance as it weaves through the different spaces of the theater. Watch the 4-minute cut of the 30-minute performance below.

This event was co-organized between Fail-Safe and the Kelly Strayhorn Theater, with financial support from the National Endowment for the Arts, Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, and the Carnegie Mellon University College of Fine Arts.

Thank You for Your Service

Thank You for Your Service utilizes the form of a military funeral to bury the placenta from the artist’s pregnancy. The script for the eulogy appropriates medical journalists’ descriptions of placental growth as “military invasion”. Through speech, song, and movement, attendees are guided through the enactment of burial rites usually reserved for members of the US Armed Forces. Culminating in the installation of a permanent outdoor memorial at LA Artcore (Los Angeles), the performance can be understood in four parts: 1) Eulogy [00:21], 2) Hymn [3:16], 3) Procession [4:14], and 4) Burial [5:25].

Responding to the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision that reversed Roe v. Wade (1973), this performance proposes an argument for reproductive rights by conjuring the Third Amendment, which prohibits the government from quartering soldiers “in any house without consent of the Owner”. Drawing analogies between trophoblasts and military operatives, between wombs and motherlands, this performance aims to collapse the gendered spaces between law, land, and labor.

Abridged video documentation (8 min) can be seen below, full documentation (21 min) can be seen here.

Good Verbal

The teacher/the mistress, the Madonna/the whore: Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, or Miranda. How does the divided feminine activate male lives, and where can we find representations of wholeness? In Good Verbal (the divided feminine talks back) the artist remixes excerpts from Joey Soloway’s 2016 TIFF keynote with lines from Cruel Intentions (1999), emails from academic administrators, and samples of verbal humiliation from her “motorboat porno mouth”. The artist performs the original text sandwiched between a human mic stand, and a closely cropped video of breasts expressing milk. View the performance documentation in its entirety below.

 

We are the Beginner (录音机)

The video blends two sets of voices:

The first is that of a mother and baby recorded in Beijing in 1986 that is from a series of audio tapes made to be sent abroad to the recently immigrated father. The second set of voices is from a conversation between a father and his adult daughter recorded in 2019 recounting his early days in the US 34 years prior.

Both these sets of voices describe a single time period within a family’s history. Fragmented, Mommy and Baby reach forward in time, while Daddy reaches back. This video embodies the intertice of these two vectors, stitching together the facets of the family’s experiences into a precarious singularity.

We are the Beginner (录音机) [3 minute Excerpt]

We are the Beginner (录音机)
Single-channel video
13:30 minutes
2021

DOMestication


DOMestication is a film created by Kim Ye, directed by Maegan La Trese Philmore, and edited by Jessica Schilling. Inspired by the genre of bridal reality television, this piece chronicles Ye’s wedding to her partner through interviews with the artist, and her friends and family. In tracing the roots of Ye’s reluctance to wed, this film activates materials from her personal archives to traverse topics ranging from BDSM and ethical non-monogamy, to immigration and intergenerational trauma. This film has a total running time of 38 minutes and has recently screened at Film Girl Film Festival (2022) and Disorient Film Festival (2022). See the trailer below.


DOMestication [trailer], single-channel video, 2021. Duration: 1 minute 17 seconds

Tall, Dark, and Handsome

In a performance that resembles a stream of consciousness love letter monologue, Kim Ye splices together topics ranging from paraphilia, to climate change, and BDSM to animism in exploring the sensuality of the human/object relationship. Weaving together found and original text with quotes from Jane Bennett, Baruch Spinoza, Michel Foucault, and WJT Mitchell, the artist engages the concept of a “script” as a subconscious force that guides humans’ interaction with their inanimate surrounding. Inverting the hierarchical relationship between the human and nonhuman, this performance attempts to describe the physical and psychic codependence between ourselves and our synthetic neighbors, playmates, and lovers while exploring the sensual possibilities between thingness and the human body.

View 4 minute excerpt

Originally performed at Human Resources as part of the Ecology of the Edge exhibition, the performance script has been published in its entirety on Mustekala and the full 22 minute video documentation can be found on vimeo.

Church of Art

Using the framing of organized spiritual practice, Church of Art is a performance that falls somewhere between a self-help seminar and institutional critique.  Combining diagrams and references culled from Pierre Bourdieu and Oprah Winfrey with middle school classrooms pedagogical techniques, Veronique d’Entremont, Kim Ye, and Laub cultivate a space that engages diverse audiences in self-reflection and analysis of our relationship to institutions.  Through sermons, music performance and audience participation, Church of Art calls on us to transcend our ego-driven motivations, internal conflicts and external pressures as practicing artists and fellow humans.

Video Documentation Highlights

  • Opening hymn (04:30)
  • Veronique D’Entremont sermon (05:35)
  • Laub musical performance (35:45)
  • Kim Ye sermon (39:30)
  • Laub musical performance (52:00)
  • Veronique D’Entremont sermon (55:30)
  • Participatory exorcism (1:08:15)
  • Kim Ye prayer to Art (1:15:30)
  • Closing Ceremony (1:22:45)

Motherhood

 

Young Joon Kwak and Kim Ye promenade down a smalltown sidewalk in flowing pastel robes and lingerie. They feed each other ramen with seductive and messy fervor. They wrestle provocatively, thick makeup smearing down their faces. These vignettes weave in and out of each other, a fractured narrative filmed in 2018 in the idylls of BanffCanada. The dreamlike threechannel film serves as the backdrop for the artists performance

-The Wattis Institute

Beginning with a screening of Maternal River of No Return, a 3-channel film commissioned by the Walter Phillips Gallery, we embark on a psychodramatic journey into motherhood at The Wattis Institute. Traversing the installations of Diamond Stingily’s Doing the Best I Can and Rosha Yaghmai’s Miraclegrow, the performance takes the audience back through the womb, exploring both the ambivalent and expectant qualities of pregnancy and birth. Responding to Stingily’s and Yaghamai’s installations as part of their built environment, Mama and Baby continue their saga together through The Wattis Institute’s galleries. Via regression and projection, Motherhood moves through time both forwards and backwards, and explodes the oneness of prenatal space into a thousand sparkling splinters.

The Maternal River of No Return

Commissioned by Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Center, The Maternal River of No Return is a collaborative video work by Young Joon Kwak and Kim Ye that presents a fragmented storyline of a fictional family holiday. Drawing attention to the constructions of gender in an intentionally exaggerated performance of femininity, Ye plays a “mommy” figure to Kwak, the “baby,” and aims to mentor the youth in the difficult process of learning to “be a woman.” This performative reflection on the process of gender transition experienced by many individuals who identify as trans is interspersed with other vignettes. Taking inspiration from a selection of photographs of Marilyn Monroe shot while the celebrity was in Banff filming the 1954 film, River of No Return, the work satirizes idealized expressions of femininity connected with the townsite’s history. A nod to their own positions as Angelenos, who, like Monroe, experienced Banff as tourists, Kwak and Ye’s video, The Maternal River of No Return (2018), also critically reflects on the stereotypes and misrecognitions of identity in relation to touristic populations in the town of Banff.

Watch 3 minute excerpt of the video installation simulation below

Score by Marvin Astorga
Director of photography: Jennifer Chiasson
2nd Camera Operator: Christopher Bussey
Photography: Jessica Whittman
 

Commissioned by Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.

Lady Scumbag

Lady Scumbag is a social project committed to giving representation to the Lady Scumbag archetype. This project exists as: 1) LadyScumbag.com and 2) Immersive participatory installations.

WHO IS LADY SCUMBAG?

As many folks are already aware, femmes circulating in the world face a slew of frustrating inequities simply because of the position we occupy.  Harassment, objectification, insolence—this is the shit with which we consistently tango, so it’s no surprise that we are exhausted by these seemingly relentless daily confrontations.

But what if we can produce our own privilege? Is it possible to transform the very qualities that are used by the hegemonic, misogynistic patriarchy to hold us down–our feminine presentation, our sexuality, our perceived demureness and incompetence—into weapons of mass destruction? Is it possible to break the glass ceiling one stiletto heel at a time?

These is what the LADYSCUMBAG archetype is all about. By simultaneously harnessing the codes of femininity while disregarding others’ judgments of Her character, LADYSCUMBAG (LSB) can operate as a secret agent, a Trojan horse that works towards the destruction of the powers that be. As a counterfeit basic bitch: LSB is crass, self-interested, and grimy on the inside. She puts Herself first, using her well-honed—if undisguised—feminine wiles to suck the resources out of unsuspecting bros and other human accessories that lay in her path. Adapting her tone to fit the situation at hand, LSB is a lady first but definitely not foremost. Amoral, not immoral, She’ll drink your beer and then piss in your lawn. Her motives are not fueled by vindictiveness or cruelty—rather her superpower stems from a blatant disregard of others’ perceptions and judgments of Her character. Utilizing desire as the path of least resistance, She is Her Own protagonist.

Always committed to finding the morsel of (self)interest in any situation, LADYSCUMBAG is a boat that produces Her Own rising tide. But for this rising tide to wash away the bullshit on the shore, LSBs need to work in tandem, scheming with one another in plain sight…

The above video was created for the project’s crowdfunding campaign. Floating across categories, it functions as both an actual pitch that calls viewers to action, as well as a work of video art. Lip-synching to my own recorded voice while putting on makeup, I take the viewer through projects I’ve realized in the recent past in this excerpt before launching into my current Lady Scumbag project concept–featuring original music and mood-boards for the Lady Scumbag installation.

To learn more about Lady Scumbag, visit the website and follow LSB on Instagram to stay in the know.

Taken Down

In this durational performance, I hired a white cis male performer to take down the art that was exhibited in my group show. From behind the camera, my voice directs him on exactly what to do and how to do it. As I give him specific orders on how to handle each piece, I also begin to extend the reach of my will to his person. Piece by piece, I instruct him to unbutton his shirt, take off his shoes, and remove his clothing–paralleling the increasingly bare walls with his increasingly bare body. Audience members were allowed to watch through strategic peep holes that are cut into tarps blocking the entryways of the gallery. Remaining conspicuously unseen as the performer becomes more and more exposed until the end, the 14:30 video below is edited from the footage I took during the 2 hour 30 minute performance.

Vocal Transplantation

Vocal Transplantation is a performance, a therapeutic exercise, and an experiment in trust. Taking the bureaucracies in which we circulate as our starting point, we point to the limits these systems impose upon our expressions of personhood. As a strategy to combat a structure that draws its power from the ability to categorize, we blur our identities by wearing opaque black bodysuits that shift our specific identities into generic silhouettes. In this state, we voice words that we cannot put on the record. Filtering our expression through the surrogate body, we bypass immigration and litigation surveillance. Our tentacles connect us, and our glasses illuminate to the rhythm of one’s own words spoken by the host’s voice. Like an incubator of secrets, we express our unmonitored and unsupervised truth.


mothertongues is Meital Yaniv & Kim Ye.

Through collaboration, mothertongues creates a sphere of authorization to exercise communal frustrations, aspirations and fears using our bodies as objects of resistance. Like jazz musicians, we employ a call and response technique to augment one another’s intuitive decisions in the performing, filming, and editing process. Tears, laughter, joy, pain, vulnerability, and bravery co-mingle through mental and physical interpersonal explorations. As amatuer scientists, we run experiments of desire on ourselves and each other, observing and documenting the chemical reactions that occur between elements. In recording our findings as specifically and subjectively as possible, we create a fiction that speaks the truth.

Casually Destroying the Patriarchy

Video excerpt of performance at Satellite Art Fair, Miami FL [December 7, 2017]

Durational performance that involves chipping away at a giant wall of ice with stiletto heels.
Performance ends when ice wall/artist’s outfit is destroyed.
Excerpt from performance statement:

A wall of ice is just a glass ceiling tipped on its side. I will embody the desires of the patriarchy, but every click-clack of my heels is a prayer to the divine feminine: Give me strength, help me expand. And so it is. I chip away at my confines, I slam against its barriers, I appropriate the restraints of the patriarchy for my own purposes: liberation, equity, self-possession.

 

7 Minutes in Hell

Part photo shoot, part therapy session, 7 Minutes in Hell is a performance that invites viewers to lock themselves into a small confined space with me. 

As potential participants enter into the field of the performance, they are asked to fill out an intake form. From the stack of completed forms, one is selected at random and the chosen participant goes into the elevator with me for 7 minutes. Once inside, we discuss the contents of their form while I direct the participant through a series of verbal and physical and prompts. This intimate experience culminates with me taking 2 polaroid photos of the participant–one for me, one for them–which acts as a document of and a response to what they are currently struggling with. Challenging the viewer’s understanding of personal space and personal boundaries, the images above are from a performance in a non-functioning elevator that measures 4 ft x 6 ft x 10 ft.

Femme Gaze Fotobooth

The Femme Gaze Fotobooth takes place in an art space, and uses the traditional party photo booth as its starting point.

However, instead of participants styling and posing themselves–with the various props, costume elements, and accessories provided–here, they are positioned and photographed according to where their figures and my desires overlap. Offering up their body as an object to be projected onto, art viewers become art objects as individual curiosities in front of the camera commingle with those from behind the camera.

Nude or clothed, anonymous or identifying, the boundaries of each scene are established through a brief negotiation immediately before the shoot. Through this gesture of consent, an ethical power exchange takes place wherein the art viewer embodies model and muse. The resulting image eliminates the distance between object and subject, presenting an opportunity for the participant to see themselves through the unapologetic lens of the female gaze. This is what it’s like to look at being looked at…

PSA [Self-Brainwash Meditation #404]

mothertongues is Meital Yaniv & Kim Ye.

Through collaboration, mothertongues creates a sphere of authorization to exercise communal frustrations, aspirations and fears using our bodies as objects of resistance. Like jazz musicians, we employ a call and response technique to augment one another’s intuitive decisions in the performing, filming, and editing process. Tears, laughter, joy, pain, vulnerability, and bravery co-mingle through mental and physical interpersonal explorations. As amatuer scientists, we run experiments of desire on ourselves and each other, observing and documenting the chemical reactions that occur between elements. In recording our findings as specifically and subjectively as possible, we create a fiction that speaks the truth.


PSA (Self-Brainwash Meditation #404), single-channel video by mothertongues, 2017. Duration: 18 minutes 44 seconds


In PSA (Self-Brainwash Meditation #404), we engage with issues of struggle revolving around women’s bodies as a dominant and dominated site. Building off historical portrayals of rape as something done to women’s bodies, we postulate a contemporary mode of understanding of rape as something done with women’s bodies. Combining a public service announcement (PSA) and guided meditation into a single form, this video blurs the line between fantasy and reality to propose potential tactics that can be used to empower those who may find themselves on the receiving end of such aggression. Taking from the principles of aikido, where the practitioner defends themselves while protecting their attacker from injury, this work envisions how to weaponize the power of surrender. By exploring the difference between experiencing a traumatic event and an identity built upon victimhood, we suggest alternative ways of resistance in which one’s vulnerability becomes one’s greatest strength.

Where I am My Own Other, Where My Mother is Me


Where I am My Own Other, Where My Mother is Me, collaboration w/Young Joon Kwak, 2017. Duration: 15 minutes, 3 seconds.

Videography: Abigail Collins, Jacinto Astiazarán; Sounds: Jeepneys & Whiteboy Scream, Corazon Del Sol & Barbara T. Smith, Marvin Astorga; [Dog Rock] sculpture: Corazon Del Sol. Contains footage from Mutant Salon’s Festival De Las Muertas (2016), Hammer Museum.


Young Joon Kwak + Kim Ye
Where I Am My Own Other, Where My Mother Is Me

by David Evans Frantz

A collaboration between artists Young Joon Kwak and Kim Ye, the video Where I Am My Own Other, Where My Mother Is Me (2017) complicates the tension between the psychological interior and exterior, performative action and documentation, fantasy and trauma, and the narrativization of gender transition. The video oscillates between footage of a performance the duo presented late last year and lushly seductive, dream-like breaks that recreate the actions performed in the prior presentation.

In the performance Kim, whose history as a professional dominatrix involves fulfilling individual fantasies through role-play scenarios, embodied a Mommy to Young, who took on the persona of her young daughter, through much of the performance embodying an infant (I will call her Baby). Part of a performance festival organized by Young’s collaborative project Mutant Salon at the Hammer Museum, in the performance Mommy berates, torments, pokes and prods, and humiliates Baby, what can be described as perhaps a hardcore Mommy Dearest-style tough love. Mommy teaches Baby to wear makeup; Baby wears high heels; Mommy instructs Baby on how to use sanitary pads; Mommy forces Baby to serve and eat cake (chastising her for eating too much and becoming fat); Mommy instructs Baby on how to work a pole and wave like a pageant queen. Tapping into the clichéd and damaging conceptions of femininity and womanhood, the give and take between Mommy and Baby’s dom/sub positionality, the hallmarks of role-play, complicate distinctions between trauma and fantasy, and gender roles and expectations.

Over the two hour duration of the performance, Mommy leads Baby through various spaces of the museum while interacting with visitors, beginning in the darkened space of Mutant Salon’s dizzying installation but progressing onto the courtyard stage, down through the Museum’s corporate marble lobby, and eventually out onto the sidewalk in Westwood along Wilshire Boulevard. The documentation of the performance is at times rough as the cameraperson negotiates the spaces of action, spectators, and the move from location to location, registering the progressive transition from interior space to an increasingly harsh light of the street. At the video’s conclusion, Baby is covered in makeup and cake waving at cars as they pass by and spectators pass in and out of the camera’s frame.

Responding to the original performance, Kwak and Ye’s video weaves the original footage with vignettes shot in the studio reenacting scenarios of the prior iteration often as close-up presenting the body in fragmented parts. These sequences are dreamy, seductive, and sensual—a kaleidoscope presentation of messy corporeality and plasticized materiality in stunning fluorescents (characteristic of other projects by Young). These perhaps introspective scenes might be best characterized as a visualization of Baby’s sub-space, the internalized psychological otherwhere of the submissive partner in a dom/sub role-play. Where the documentary footage is palpably past (this already occurred), the added sequences are notably of another temporality, perhaps not future but certainly somewhere other, possibly of undetermined interiority. At times, audio-recordings from the prior performance are presented over the newly shot sequences, a disjunctive meeting that upends the apprehension of linear time. These sequences are at times slow and glutinous, while at other moments are fast and frenetic, and often focus fetishistically on a particular object from the prior performance: heels, cake, handcuffs. While these segments reiterate the mother-daughter relationship previously established, the tone is subtly different. In one instance, slow pans over Ye’s face showing her wincing are intercut with her harshly reprimanding Baby who is handcuffed to a street light pole, pointing to the oscillation of multiple affects between mother and daughter engendered by the performance and video.

Through its layering of different audio and visual recordings, Where I Am My Own Other, Where My Mother Is Me blurs distinctions between the event, its documentation, and its reception both by the viewer and within the participant. In its reiteration of a mother-daughter script through the lens of sub/dom role-play, the performance also proposes alternate genealogies for genderfuckery and transness within a queer and feminist lens. As Kwak explained, the intention of the performance was to be a two-hour initiation by Ye into the process (including the perils and possibilities) of becoming a woman. As LGBT identity categories have become increasingly fixed and part of an increasing liberal order of commodity capitalism, Kwak and Ye’s collaboration ruminates on the messy relations between gender performance and temporality of performance through documentation.

Untitled (Owl Experiment #101)

mothertongues is Meital Yaniv & Kim Ye.

Through collaboration, mothertongues creates a sphere of authorization to exercise communal frustrations, aspirations and fears using our bodies as objects of resistance. Like jazz musicians, we employ a call and response technique to augment one another’s intuitive decisions in the performing, filming, and editing process. Tears, laughter, joy, pain, vulnerability, and bravery co-mingle through mental and physical interpersonal explorations. As amatuer scientists, we run experiments of desire on ourselves and each other, observing and documenting the chemical reactions that occur between elements. In recording our findings as specifically and subjectively as possible, we create a fiction that speaks the truth.


Untitled (Owl Experiment #101), single-channel video by mothertongues, 2017. Duration: 5 minutes 46 seconds


Untitled (Owl experiment #101), is a 5 minute 46 second a single-channel video in which the artists abstract their bodies through obfuscation and costume exchange to explore the physics of pleasure through a DIY purple vibrating owl. Set in a blank space outfitted with only a bench and wrestling mat, the artists position their bodies in different configurations, tetrising themselves and their desires in an attempt to reach a transcendent place of mutual pleasure. In this mundane space, bodies cultivate intimacy on their own, placing themselves outside of both romantic and pornographic contexts. In contrast to popular queer representation, the viewer’s pleasure is set aside in lieu of a more honest expression of pleasure and climax.

The purple owl used in this performance is deconstructed in front of the camera, exposing its construction and transformation as a custom, handmade tool. Independent of the video, the purple owl is a relic that represents the fantasy of total individual fulfillment while being in connection with another. Through a process of bricolage involving pieces of pre-existing sex toys–i.e. vibrating bullet and fleshlight–encased by a children’s balloon, the new creation informes the bodies on how to interact and move with one another.

Shared Value: An Open Letter

 

The following open letter was published and distributed from July until September, 2016:

Dear Artist,

Money is slippery; it can be everything without being anything. It seeps into your life and dissipates into a smattering of goods—vanishing without any record of where it came or went. It is decidedly non-specific.

Your work is specific—valuable in a way that is unique and inseparable from its material state. Every mark an index of a choice you once made, a motion you executed with your body. You trade your work for money. But would you trade it for something as specific as your work? Perhaps an experience created and curated just for you, one that lives inside you going forward?

Ask yourself what kind of experience you would want to have in order to part with your work. It could be as explicit and as expansive as the art you create; studied but spontaneous, complex but generous, mysterious and hiding in plain sight. This experience, like your work, could give you freedom within a structure–lovingly coercing those who slide down its rabbit hole into a space of playful disorientation and discovery.

From the vanilla to the extreme, I propose a trade that is somewhat unorthodox. I propose to trade your creativity, your energy, your expression, for mine. Exchange a piece of your work for an experience in fantasy fulfillment with a seasoned professional roleplayer. The tone of the scene can be friendly, seductive, aloof, and/or nasty—the choice is up to you. This is simply an invitation to discuss further the possibilities that exist between us as artists seeking different forms of exchange outside capitalist systems…can we find shared value through uncommon currencies?

If you are interested in taking part in this project, please get in touch via link below. Know that everything we discuss stays between the two of us—discretion is assured. If you prefer to email directly, please include in your correspondence a bit about yourself, link(s) to your work, and a general idea of what you think you’d like for us to explore together (if you know).

Once received, I will send you a confirmation with further instructions for the next step, and we’ll go from there.

Until then,

K

Artist Response Form @ http://tiny.cc/sharedvalue

or email direct @ kimsu.ye [at] gmail

Los Angeles exchanges occurred through the duration of Shared Value at Visitor Welcome Center. Exchanged pieces were added to the exhibition through the closing on September 3rd, 2016.

Some mentions:

Hyperallergic: ArtRx LA | 7/26/16

W Magazine: Best Alternative Art Galleries in LA | 7/22/16

Be the Cult Leader You Wish to Follow

 

This workshop for artists is designed to teach the cultural producer how to
BYD: BUILD YOUR DREAM

Learn what artists have in common with cult leaders and use their tips & tricks to cultivate a following! Stop self-sabotaging and start to BYD today. Protégés will learn (and be subject to) brainwashing techniques, aesthetic overhauls, manipulating group dynamics, and harnessing the awesome power of one’s own neuroses! This workshop will require your physical involvement in art making, writing, public speaking, improvisation, public humiliation, group critique, group movement, and so much more!

Past Performances:

Pomona College | 10/4/2016
Machine Project | 7/14/2016

Art Scene II


Art Scene II, performance with Christine Wang, 2016. Duration: 23 minutes

Dominate Yourself

DOMINATE YOURSELF, is a program composed of 1-hour sessions designed to bring you face to face with the worst you have to offer. Part artist talk, part group exercise class, part D/s sermon, this participatory performance is an experiment in using physical education to transcend traditional notions of self.

As a participant, you are expected be punctual and to wear something easy to move in so that you can properly surrender to forces greater than yourself. Come prepared to delve through your personal baggage so that together, we can conquer insecurities, internalize reality’s inherent contradictions, and come out the other side stronger than ever imagined!


Dominate Yourself, promotional video for participatory performance, 2015. Duration: 3 minutes 38 seconds