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 screenings to performances, presentations reflected on how embodied practices generate new forms of knowledge and shape relationships to research, institutions, and collective life. The evening’s topics included queer nightlife, sex work, community archives, mutual aid, kink, labor, disability advocacy, sensuality, and cruising.

As part of the program, Ye workshopped a new work entitled Routine Maintenance Ritual, exploring the DIY aesthetic procedure as a form of ritualized, medicalized self-care that both disciplines and fortifies the feminized body in late-stage capitalism.

Video documentation of the evening can be found HERE and features contributions from Keko Jackson, Lucas Hilderbrand, Kayla Tange, Stacy Macias, Summer Jade Leavitt, Jih-Fei Cheng, Zihan Loo, RJ Aguiar, Alisa Yang, Farrah, Kendall Ota, Maria Silk, and Laura Dudu (嘟嘟) with CAO Collective.

This event is sponsored by the Creativity, Theory, and Politics Research Cluster as well as RAce GEnder and Sexuality (RAGES) in USC American Studies & Ethnicity, USC Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies, USC Consortium for Gender, Sexuality, Race and Public Culture, the University of California Humanities Research Institute, UC Berkeley Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, and BAD ASIANS.