performances | KIM YE

The Night Shift: Queer Desire, Erotic Labor, and Radical Care After Dark

December 18, 2025 by Nhi Huynh

In November 2025, Kim Ye took part in The Night Shift: Queer Desire, Erotic Labor, and Radical Care After Dark, a symposium hosted by the University of Southern California that brought together artists, scholars, and organizers working across performance, visual culture, gender, sexuality, race, and labor. Through diverse formats ranging from lightning talks to film […]

Categories: 2025, event or performance, EVERYTHING, news, performances • Tags: alisa yang, BAD ASIANS, CAO Collective, community archives, cruising, disability advocacy, Farrah, Jih-Fei Cheng, Kayla Tange, Keko Jackson, Kendall Ota, kink, labor, Laura Dudu (嘟嘟), Lucas Hilderbrand, Maria Silk, mutual aid, queer nightlife, RJ Aguiar, Routine Maintenance Ritual, sensuality, sex work, Stacy Macias, Summer Jade Leavitt, The Night Shift, UC Berkeley Department of Theater Dance and Performance Studies, University of California Humanities Research Institute, University of Southern California, Zihan Loo

A Costco Shopper Analysis

July 8, 2023 by Isabel Sosa Whitelaw

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 […]

Categories: 2023, EVERYTHING, performances, vids, work • Tags: Business INsider, Costco, Costco Art, Food Fertility and Border Control, Greenhouse Project UCSC, Institutional critique Kim Ye, KCHUNG, Kim Ye performance art, Kim Ye Performance LA, Kim Ye performance Santa Cruz, MOCA Geffen, Performance art Los Angeles, Santa Cruz performance art, The Greenhouse Project, UCSC, University of Santa Cruz art

Matrilineal Ambivalences

December 8, 2022 by Isabel Sosa Whitelaw

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 […]

Categories: 2022, collaboration, EVERYTHING, performances, vids, work • Tags: AAPI Performance Artists, Angela Washko, Asian American performance art, Carnegie Mellon University College of Fine Arts, Fail-Safe: Los Angeles x Pittsburgh, Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, Jesse Stiles, Kelly strayhorn theater, Matrilineal Ambivalences, National Endowment for the Arts, Performance artist Los Angeles, Pittsburgh performance art, Scott Andrew, Young Joon Kwak, Young Joon Kwak and Kim Ye

Thank You for Your Service

November 4, 2022 by admin

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 […]

Categories: 2022, EVERYTHING, performances, things, vids, work • Tags: Chinese American artist, Chinese american performance art, Kim Ye, Kim Ye artist, kim Ye Chinese American artist, Kim Ye Los Angeles, Kim Ye performance, la art core, la art core performance, Los Angeles performance art

Good Verbal

May 18, 2022 by admin

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, […]

Categories: 2022, EVERYTHING, performances, vids, work • Tags: BDSM, breast milk, cis male narratives, coerced bi, cruel intentions, female domination, female gaze, FemDom, forced bi, forced femme, Good verbal, hand expression, HR LA, Human Resources, human resources Los Angeles, joey soloway, Kim Ye, Kim Ye performance art, Los Angeles performance art, madonna whore complex, male gaze, male submissives, objectification, performance documentation, sex work, slut shaming, the divided feminine, the female gaze, the male gaze, video documentation

Tall, Dark, and Handsome

March 20, 2020 by admin

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 […]

Categories: 2019, EVERYTHING, performances, vids, work • Tags: contemporary performance art, Ecology of the edge, Human Resources, Human Resources LA, Kim Ye, Kim Ye artist, Kim Ye LA, Kim Ye performance art, kim ye performance artist, LA performance artist, Los Angeles, Performance art LA, performance artist

Church of Art

July 31, 2019 by admin

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 […]

Categories: 2019, collaboration, EVERYTHING, performances, vids, work • Tags: church of art, Human Resources, Human Resources LA, Kim Ye, Kim Ye performance art, Kim Ye Veronique d'Entremont church of art, Laub, Performance art Los Angeles, veronique d'entremont

Motherhood

March 29, 2019 by admin

Young Joon Kwak and Kim Ye promenade down a small–town 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 Banff, Canada. The dreamlike three–channel film serves as the […]

Categories: 2019, collaboration, EVERYTHING, performances, vids, work • Tags: and Kim Ye, CCA, CCA Wattis Institute, Diamond Stingily, Diamond Stingily's Doing the Best I Can, Doing the Best I Can, Kim Ye, Kim Ye and Young Joon Kwak, Kim Ye Motherhood, Kim Ye Motherhood performance, Kim Ye performance art, LA performance artists, Miraclegrow, Motherhood performance, performance art, Rosha Yaghmai, Rosha Yaghmai's Miraclegrow, San Francisco performance art, the watt, The wattis institute, Wattis Institute, Young Joon Kwak

Taken Down

April 1, 2018 by admin

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 […]

Categories: 2018, EVERYTHING, performances, vids, work • Tags: ACRE, ACRE performance, Kim Ye ACRE, Kim Ye ACRE Taken Down, Kim Ye performance ACRE, Kim Ye performance chicago, Kim Ye video, Kim Ye video art, Lauren Leving, Taken Down, Taken Down ACRE, Taken down Kim Ye

Vocal Transplantation

March 30, 2018 by admin

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 […]

Categories: 2018, collaboration, EVERYTHING, performances, work • Tags: Kim Ye, Kim Ye LACE, Kim Ye Meital Yaniv performance, LACE, LACE performance LA, live performance vocal transplantation LACE, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles LACE, MEITAL YANIV, Meital Yaniv Kim Ye collaboration, mothertongues, mothertongues (Meital Yaniv & Kim Ye), mothertongues live performance, mothertongues Los Angeles, mothertongues performance, mothertongues performance art, Vocal Transplantation, Vocal Transplantation performance