BmoreArt

Michael Anthony Farley: So, we’re in a space called Currency Studio. Is this usually a gallery? I feel so out of the loop!

Phaan Howng: It’s actually a brand by Michael Haskins Jr. Michael designed all the clothing in here, and this is a functional retail space, which really worked out. All the pieces that I curated into this space relate to the body.

This piece—I just felt like it looked like a figure painting that exploded, body parts everywhere! Stephanie J. Williams has all their soft sculptures that look like intestines.

And this piece is a ceramic chair by Gaeun Kim. I am a sucker for bumpy sculptures and weird ceramics.

I actually really like the ambiguity in this space of what is a curated artwork, what is a design object that’s “native” to the site as a store, things that look like furniture or displays…

Yeah, this is actually an artist’s—Lite Zhang, who graduated from Rinehart—next door, you’ll see he has a larger installation. He also did those pieces with the dog toys over there that he calls “Booger,” which is great. It’s all used dog toys his dog chewed-up.

It’s satisfying that Zhang’s bag piece—and really, a lot of the work or interventions in this show—is almost scaled to the body. Like weirdo houseguests in dialogue with the garments that live here full time.

So are Taha’s pieces! The one on the right is his latest oil painting that he did… I love that she looks like she’s yelling at this guy… which I guess is like political vibes.

And the one who looks like that famous Gerhard Richter painting, I was, like, “Taha! She’s like the guilty white lady that’s looking away!” That’s how I see it.

That’s so funny. I can’t unsee it. And then you have Cindy Cheng’s body parts and other ceramics that feel much more “precious” without losing their sense of humor…

There are nipples and skin tags on this cup, which is so cool! Okay, I mean, it’s awesome! Body parts everywhere! So that was very integrated with the clothing. And then we have Taha Heydari’s “Late Night Drawings” on this bookshelf area, which is like this archive, or a library of dead bodies or something…

Now we’re entering the old ICA space, and it feels so different! Is this a video of a dead bird getting a manicure?? What a way to greet viewers! 

Zara Kahan just hired this nail artist to give this dead bird a manicure. A bird that actually has no head… it’s just like a dead bird, and then it’s getting bedazzled nails. [Laughs] And when I saw this, I paired it with the only one of my former students I invited to show: Neil Chatterjee. I just always love his drawing aesthetic, even while he was in undergrad, I loved how he doesn’t care and just wants to draw animals. I told Zara, “Welp. I guess this is the ‘weirdo bird section’ now!”

It seems like the space has been really chopped-up architecturally since the last time I was here! 

Yeah, this was being used as a vintage store and I kinda temporarily kicked them out. At first I hated this wall, and then I realized there were all these architectural details in Se Jong Cho’s paintings. So I got permission to carve into these walls in a way that opened up the flow but also referenced her paintings. I love that she has a doctorate in science but is basically a self-taught painter.  And she also did sticker murals you’ll see scattered around, as well as chalk murals made with kids for the opening.

Wow. Phaan, this is incredible. I feel like this has always been a notoriously difficult space to fill. And yet it feels populated even though we’re on a private tour. Are you drawn to sculptures that are roughly human-sized? I feel like all the 3D works in this room function as a surrogate body, like an old trick architects used to do with extraneous columns to make grandiose public buildings feel crowded. But it doesn’t look overhung at all. Every sightline is so satisfying. This is seriously better-hung than most biennials I have been to in the past few years. 

Now I am going to say something that I know you are going to hate me for…

Oh no…

This room reminds me of your work! I feel like a lot of the painting—and even the sculptures—have some reference to painterly gestures even if they aren’t painterly in the traditional sense. And so much seems to reference landscapes… this is the part you’re going to hate! I feel like I’m getting sumi ink landscape painting vibes! I am saying this half-jokingly to piss you off… but even Sutton Demlong’s assemblages have an almost calligraphic quality and sense of movement? 

*Groan* But you’re right—I did want this space to feel playful. I told Thiang, “Look, just show me big paintings. I don’t care if they’re stretched!” And thankfully he had these, because so much of his work was in New York for a show. Emon Surakitkoson is actually another self-taught painter, I believe. And I like that they reference identity without being the obvious figurative painting. I didn’t want any figuration in this show, but there’s some. I drew the line at “grandma on the couch” paintings, though. None of those!

Jiangshengyu Nova Pan’s video projected onto vertical slats was probably one of the most technically challenging parts of this install. But I didn’t care. I wanted it. And then you turn the corner and there’s this surprise. I knew about this space because I had seen the TLaloC show here a few years ago, and it was incredible. Kei Ito has this piece of uranium glass, and a rotating spotlight is being projected through it across the space, basically as we found it. Kei works a lot with references to radioactivity because his grandfather survived the Hiroshima bombing. But don’t worry! According to Kei, the glass is only about as radioactive as a banana.

There’s something so eerie and beautiful about this, even though it’s such a simple gesture. I feel like we’re in a scene from The Last of Us. It has really appropriately postapocalyptic vibes, like we are survivors of some environmental disaster. 

You should see it from the porn room! That’s my favorite.

The porn room? 

Yes! There’s a little hallway full of old porn at the gay bar next door, The Club Car, and there’s a hole in the wall where you can look through to this room. It’s the best vantage point.

This storefront was really fun for me. I loved the idea of it being food-centric. Thea Canlas has an installation all about the industrialized food supply chain in the Philippines, and has hosted these amazing Filipino dinners where we all eat off of banana leaves down the street at the Motor House. Tae Hwang’s parents used to own a grocery store, so she made this work that was kind of like a still life inspired by the food they would sell, and I asked her if I could enlarge it to fill the space. I also love that there’s a hot dog in the pattern, because I call this “The Hot Dog Room” in honor of Andrew Liang’s sculpture of a hot dog, which is like our mascot. It’s the star. He was inspired by “The Thinking Man.”

I love this. It reminds me of my favorite new genre of images, coined by my friend, the filmmaker Tessa Greenberg: The Window Snack. A window snack is like porn, you know it when you see it—those uncanny photoshop collages of food products in bodega storefronts, where you might have a coffee waterfall cascading over a mountain of deli meat and the perspective is all wrong. It somehow tries to be appetizing but always end up being sort of disgusting?

So now we’re in the lobby of the Motor House, which must be a challenging site, but I really like the works you selected. 

It is! Because it’s a historic building we couldn’t drill into the walls to mount anything, and there’s so much going on. So I thought about artworks with really seductive textures and craftsmanship…

You really do want to get closer to these. I love YunKyoung Cho’s fiber still lives! They almost remind me of Tom Sachs, but the way he sort of deliberately makes his representations of aspirational consumer objects “crafty” in an affected way, Cho’s are so flawlessly executed and endearing…

Now that we’ve walked through most of the show… I have to say, this is such an incredible exhibition. Could you give us some background on how it came about?

I was invited by the Asian Arts & Culture Center at Towson University to curate their annual AAPI (Asian American and Pacific Islander) Heritage Month show, although now we say APIMEDA—Asian, Pacific Islander, Middle Eastern, Desi American—you know, we were very inclusive about all of “Greater Asia.”

None of us—or I should say people like me, Taha, Se Jong—would ever want to apply to an open call that’s just labelled like “APIMEDA Artists.” So when I hit up Se Jong, I told her, “look… this is not a show about identity politics. I don’t want something didactic.” And so I felt people were more comfortable with me being like “HEY! It’s me doing this shit! It’s going to be funny!” I wanted this show to have a sense of humor, or to be kinda Dada-esque.

This was the idea from the beginning. And originally, I had this idea to curate a show with 15 artists, starting with our friends and peers we know from here in Baltimore, like, “Hey! come be in my show! I know you have this piece here in your studio and you’re not doing anything with it…” And eventually I realized I needed to get a more diverse group of Asians from the region, and not just 95% Koreans! How do you get a group that really represents a diverse diaspora in the greater Baltimore/DMV area? So I really did the research and reached out to artists I didn’t even know. But it was nice, because we bonded over telling each other “our Asian stories” [laughs]… you know, “Fuck! Why did this white person do this? DEI trauma!” Etcétera…

So those people rounded-out my first curated fifteen artists. And at first I wanted just these fifteen artists. But I thought about it, and I decided to put out an open call, and 55 artists applied to the open call! So of that group, I selected 10.

It was all strong work, and it was a good mix. I knew I was working with a really small production budget, but I wanted to be ambitious. I thought, “I’m going to do this. It’s going to be fun.”

And then it ended up being insane! Because everything I do has to be…

I am so extra. I told everyone “I’m hiring a real graphic designer to do shit!” and so this has the guide to all the artists, their bios, with a map of all the spaces, and each space has a map of with a guide to where each artist’s work is. I am a pro!

Who did your graphic design?

Hayelin Choi. I met Hayelin a while ago when she was a grad student at MICA for graphic design, and now she teaches full time. She did this awesome project here in Station North for her thesis that actually focused on how this area used to be like the unofficial Koreatown! And so, I was like, “no, but you have to do this. Can I pay you not a lot of money to make this glorious thing happen because I can’t?” Luckily she had the time. I was like, ready to die if I had to do the graphics. I’m so super anal about everything.

[Jokingly] Oh god Phaan, are you a “Tiger Mom” curator?

Haha! Oh no! I am! I tiger-mom-bullied all the artists… Oh my god, you’re right. Tiger-bullying is the new cyber-bullying. I cyber-tiger-bullied everyone to get it just right.

But it was mostly consensual bullying! I did ask every artist would you be okay with this? Are you okay if I install your work in this way? And then, like, how much work do you want to do? What are you okay with? What are you not okay with? And then, just having those conversations, interesting things came up about the spaces. Would it be cool to integrate artwork with clothes in Currency Studio? Having intestines going through pockets?

And then I wanted to glorify these spaces with histories: the former ICA, Mobtown Ballroom, which is where Red Emma’s used to be, and now it’s a cafe where people learn to dance… It’s an interesting context. Ameena Fareeda originally applied with illustrations of tigers, which was not really what I wanted. Tiger Mom! So I looked at her website and realized she had these really awesome K-Pop inspired posters she was just making for fun, and I just thought those were so appropriate for a dance space and ended up being cooler than the initial proposal… so the sites definitely informed how the exhibition took shape. But it’s always a negotiation.

That’s one of the things I really appreciate about the show—it feels lived in, like it’s a part of the neighborhood instead of being dropped in a “white cube.” You have people trying on and buying clothes in the same space as these totally alien artworks. Installations about food are installed in cafes… One of my favorite moments of the tour was leaving “The Hot Dog Room” to walk over to “The Porno Booth” and while we’re talking about the artworks, a man in a crop top dropped a McDonald’s iced coffee and everyone on the street booed. That’s Baltimore!

And I think that also relates a bit to the experience of a lot of diaspora communities, right? Like this idea that you end up out-of-context and sort of filling in the cracks of some chaotic new place. There’s a mosaic of external factors… I love walking through a gay bar full of porn to look through a hole in the wall and seeing Kei Ito’s totally postapocalyptic intervention one building over!

The vibes worked out. This is why we love Baltimore, right? We have those beautiful moments. We have all these cool alternative spaces. People make cool shit! It’s not just the views—it’s a reminder that Baltimore really helped foster a lot of these artists. You have room for experimentation, you’re not stuck making tiny baby paintings like you would be in a New York studio. You can have guests doing crazy experimental work and pushing themselves, you know?

And I think that touches on something really important about this show, and how we view work from the APIMEDA diaspora. Being “Asian” isn’t something inherently “other”… I think the US has a weird, very myopic view of “identity,” probably because it was an apartheid state for so long. But really, statistically, a human being is more likely to be from the continent of Asia—the largest, most populated continent on the planet—than anywhere else!

What sets this group of artists apart is their relationship to both there and here. Like, being “Asian” isn’t the anomaly—being an artist who ended up in Baltimore, on the other side of the world from where they or their grandparents were born, that’s what’s interesting to me. 

I know I am probably not allowed to say this, but we’ve both talked about how we’re kinda sick of “identity politics” in America as usual, you know? Especially in institutional settings. And especially in Baltimore. Everyone gets assigned a topic based on what they put on their census, like, “you are a trans* Afro-Latinx painter and all your work must be autobiographical and only in dialogue with other trans* Afro-Latinx artists. It doesn’t matter if you’re more interested in ontological concerns—this is the lens through which we will view your work.” 

Okay, thank you! It’s so frustrating to me! That’s the one thing—of why I really wanted to do the show. I wanted to demonstrate that it’s not helpful that we keep getting boxed into stereotypes. How do we break stereotypes? Like, maybe this person who is trans Afro-Latina wants to make hard-edge abstraction. For fun! Because that’s just what they’re interested in and they don’t give any fucks about identity politics. Can we be seen as humans? As normal people?

It’s sad that this narrative keeps getting pushed onto people, like making identity art feels like an obligation.

It’s what sells to guilty rich people and gets funded by their institutions! It’s the art world’s identity-industrial-complex…

This is so much my experience from art school, “Oh, this is my trauma…” Ok. Why are you re-traumatizing yourself? It seems kind of not helpful? I get it, but at the same time I get angry at the Identity-Industrial-Art-Market-Complex forcing artists who could be free of that to just fucking make art! I am interested in Victorian houseplants… but do I have to make art about Chinese herbs or some shit? We’re not breaking stereotypes when we think that way—it’s just reinforcing them! I can’t handle it. I’m over it.

Looking at this show, I really appreciate how there’s not an impulse to narrate “The Asian American Experience” as a universal. Obviously having roots in South Korea and living in the DC suburbs is wholly different than being from Tehran and moving to Baltimore. And there are all these levels of different kinds of cultural displacement that change the way you look at the world…

Do you know the term “Third Culture Kid”? No? I found myself thinking about that a lot walking through the show, because you and I share a lot of the hallmark traits. I think it was coined by a psychologist in Singapore in the 1960s and then didn’t really catch on until decades later when it was the reality of so much of the world.

Basically, she observed that children of families from one or more countries who grow up in a place that’s neither of their “ancestral homelands” and then move again develop a unique set of personality traits and worldview. So if your dad is Malaysian and your mom is Dutch but you get shipped off to school in Switzerland or something—although this is also true of people with much less “privileged” upbringings—you pick and choose the things you accept or reject from each culture.

So it’s different from the typical story of someone who immigrated from just one place to another. You develop a wicked sense of humor, distrust of governments or authority figures, but easily make social bonds across different cultural or language boundaries. But you never feel like you 100% fit in anywhere, but that’s okay, because you make your own culture of peers that transcends your nationality/ race/ class/ religion/ whatever…

I was thinking about Cindy Cheng’s work, which is very much informed by the fact that she grew up in Hong Kong—already a very globalized context with its own authoritarian issues—and then moved to the United States and was so weirded out by American conspiracy theories and approaches that with such humor. Or Andrew Liang’s work, which is all about culture shock of moving from Taiwan to Texas, of all places, and adapting to a new alphabet and context and what gets lost in translation. It’s like you become a culture of one.

Although we have totally different “origin stories,” language is such a relatable point of entry into someone else’s experience for me! When I moved to Barcelona, I adopted the nom de plume “quètxup” because it cracked me up… like an English (actually Chinese!) loan word that’s pronounced exactly the same but that the language officials decided to make look more “Catalan” with the most extra, dramatic spelling possible… although I imagine our experiences are totally different because moving from Baltimore/ Miami/ Mexico City to Catalonia is the first time in my life living in a city where I am surrounded overwhelmingly by people who actually look exactly like me, haha!

It’s so real! I grew up in the whitest place on Earth! You know, we didn’t grow up in LA or New York or somewhere where there’s like a bajillion Asians… first in New Mexico, and then Florida…

Wait, you grew up in New Mexico?? Does Kei Ito know this?

Yes! Speaking of radiation… it’s probably making me insane. He told me he took his geiger counter out there and was like, “fuck.”
And then in Coral Springs, fucking Florida…like we had the tiniest little Chinese community. I was president of the Asian Club in my high school, and we had Taiwanese, Vietnamese, kids from Hong Kong… it was pretty diverse. Because growing up in this very white suburb we had to have each other! But then again, we’re all pretty American.

I wouldn’t say I am a “Karen” but I definitely don’t relate to the Asian narrative where I am going to paint figurative paintings for the Identity-Industrial-Complex of precious childhood memories making dumplings with my grandma or whatever, because that wasn’t my childhood! We never made food together… If I want a dumpling I’m gonna eat that shit, not make art about it.
Also, you grew up in Florida! The food of the motherland is Taco Bell…

Oh, and Pollo Tropical. And I know Publix is super problematic, but I want that fucking sub with that yellow sauce because it’s so fucking good! And sure, sometimes I do want beef noodles, but they’re all my comfort foods.

So this is why I told the artists, “Look, I know this is a show for API Heritage Month, but I want a show that’s funny and good. It has to be white-passing. I don’t want any didactic shit.”

Oh god. A “white-passing” show? Phaan, you are going to Identity Politics Hell. and I am going with you because I just laughed.

But speaking of Florida, did you see the Ai Weiwei retrospective at the PAMM in Miami a few years ago, the one where the guy broke the vase? I was really surprised to see his earlier work and how much more I liked it… in the 1980s he was living in the East Village and just kind of processing how chaotic and “exotic” and freeing it was for him, having an “American Experience”… and that’s so much more interesting to me than the kinda kitschy chinoiserie I feel like he started producing for export to the Western market with its orientalist gaze… 

I didn’t see it, but yeah, you’re right. It’s like this Edward Said theory that we’re constantly repackaging and sanitizing ourselves for the orientalist Western gaze… like, stop looking at us! It’s so frustrating.

But that Ai Weiwei show reminds me of a funny story Andrew Liang told me: the first time he and his sister saw someone picking up dog poop and putting it in a bag. Their minds were blown! Like, “What the fuck? This guy is picking up a dog’s poop and putting it in a bag?” Because they had never seen that. So one of Andrew’s sculptures is of a guy picking up poop. It’s beautiful. It’s amazing.

I love the idea that something we take for granted as “normal” in America can be so shocking if you’ve never seen a white person pick up poop before!

Right! To me that’s “the immigrant experience” that’s relatable and sparks empathy, you know? The things that are quotidian but weird and funny if you’re an “outsider” experiencing a new culture. But no one is going to make an Oscar-winning film about white people scooping dog poop. 

Yeah, because everyone loves trauma! No one wants “identity art” to be funny.

I mean, humor—even if it’s not universal—is how people relate! Just think: in the 20th century both the Farley and Howng families left two tiny island countries at opposite ends of a giant tectonic plate in search of a better life… Two islands that just wanted to be independent from their bullying immediate neighbors across respective seas but that went on to be very wealthy countries today.

And then against all odds you and I ended up meeting years ago as broke-ass artists in Baltimore, bonding over a bottle of whisky and the fact that both of our parents ended up in fucking Florida, which, funnily enough scores lower on the Human Development Index than either Ireland or Taiwan! If that’s not irony…

You know Taiwan has a lot of sympathizers in Ireland? It’s true! Ireland was one of the first countries to support Taiwanese independence. I think it is that colonial history…

…and also the fact that Irish and Taiwanese artists love turning trauma into comedy. 

After a while, you’re like, I don’t like being traumatized. Who likes that!? I don’t want to see a painting about your grandma’s generational trauma or listen to a song about it…

Well if there’s a song about generational trauma, we want to be able to dance to it at least.
Speaking of which, I do think of your studio practice as very political, but also ambiguous and playing with irony and humor. And it never comes across as moralizing.  

Yeah. I am going to talk about the environment. But I am not going to yell at people and lecture them because that’s what everyone does. No one likes being lectured!

That’s part of what I wanted to achieve with this show, to bring attention to the heritage that’s being erased from this neighborhood in a way that’s inviting and everyone feels welcome… I want someone leaving Queerscape to wander in because the art is good and discover that this was Koreatown.

In the past few years so many Korean businesses have closed, the brutalist KAGRO building was torn down to make way for a fucking parking lot, the Crown closed… it all feels like a slap in the face. So we made these plaques, thinking, “Okay. Why are there historic designations in Bolton Hill about famous writers or doctors who lived in whatever house but none documenting the community that was here?”

You know, I think the Parkway used to be a Korean grocery store when I was a teenager… with a drop ceiling? So it’s really appropriate it’s hosting the Extra Credit screenings this Friday! 

Yes! I am so excited for that. Zara Kahan is curating a selection of short films, because I don’t know shit about film! But Zara is great, and everyone should come see the show!

The Extra Credit short film screening, curated by Zara Kahan, will begin with a reception at 6pm on Friday, May 30th at The Parkway (Tickets and more information available here). 

A closing reception for the exhibition will be held Saturday, May 31, from 5- 8:30 p.m. at 16 W. North Avenue, Currency Studio, Motor House, Club Car

Featured artists: Reed Bmore, Thea Canlas, Neil Chatterjee, Cindy Cheng, Se Jong Cho, YunKyoung Cho, Sutton Demlong, Ameena Fareeda, Taha Heydari, Tae Hwang, Kei Ito, Zara Kahan, Gaeun Kim, Wednesday Kim, Andrew Liang, Yefu Liu, Katherine Mann, Audrey Naiva, Nova Pan, Sookkyung Park, Emon Sirakitkoson, Clipber Tran, Thiang Uk, Stephanie J. Williams, and Lite Zhang.