Amy Yao

AF

I saw your work last spring at 47 Canal in New York. I was taken with the pearlesque ball-pit installation and the uncanny feeling that coalesces around the ossified sculptures. I’m more familiar with your earlier work that considers pollution and toxicity. How did you arrive at this new body of work?

AY

The body of work in New York was actually shown first at the Power Station in Dallas. When I was asked to do a show there, it was for a side space within the station. I had just produced a project for the Honolulu Biennial at the Foster Botanical Garden. I worked with one of the researchers at the garden and asked questions about borders and boundaries, and whether they had any invasive plants that they were working with at the garden. You know, botanical gardens often display a variety of imported, exotic plants with fewer local species.

I was thinking about the differences between what’s wanted and desired or seen as a sign of power, versus what’s not wanted; what is considered a foreign body, let’s say (body not necessarily referring to a human body, although maybe it's human.) We’re witnessing a more extreme version of it now, but at the time, there was already “build-the-wall” rhetoric circulating alongside a reckoning with the outcomes of colonial expansion and all the attendant issues. This context made me think a lot about what belongs, what doesn’t belong, what’s welcome, what’s not welcome, policing, and again the idea of borders and boundaries.

The botanical garden was a starting point for working through many of these ideas. There’s a contradiction there, too, with this collection of many species that are obviously foreign and described as “exotic.” The word “exotic” might have positive connotations, as something that’s rare and desired, but in the case of the Botanical Garden, those connotations seemed always already complicated. There was one species in particular, taken from a bodhi tree that was given to Mary Foster, the former owner of the Botanical Garden, as a precious gift. The bodhi tree sapling was gifted to her from a monk and was said to be from the original Bodhi Tree that the Buddha attained enlightenment under. That gift, though, became a borderline invasive species in Hawaiʻi because it has the capacity to reproduce and, in turn, threaten the local water table.

So the researchers pull out all the saplings that drop from the tree. There’s a second layer to this story: the bodhi tree is only able to reproduce via pollination by a specific species of wasp. Without the wasp, the tree couldn’t endanger Hawaiʻi by reproducing. And yet, because of shipping containers and foreign travel, that specific species of wasp has eventually  made its way to Hawaiʻi, which is how the tree can germinate new saplings in the first place. Thinking about all these different layers was interesting, so I wrote a text about it.

When I was asked to do something at the Power Station, not long after the Hawaiʻi show, I thought about doing something related to the earlier project. Texas is a pretty intense space to think about those issues due to its shared border with Mexico. Through my research, I came across the “Asian clam.” The Asian clam is considered a nemesis to industry because it clogs power stations, which I thought was really funny. Although the Power Station is no longer active, this imaginary, fantastic scenario came into my head about this clam that’s invasive to Texas—all while Trump was talking about the coronavirus in Asia as the “China virus.”

We reached out to a bunch of scientists who research invasive species. They agreed with our ideas about this language and its troubling attachment to ethnicities. As a shorthand, “Asian clam” makes it easy for the general public to understand that this species of clam is not from here. In the same breath, though, that designation reproduces the language of fear and xenophobia attached to foreign bodies. Many of the people researching the clam, including those who work for the USDA, acknowledged that, yes, the language is a problem. I contacted them initially to get the live clams, but I was told that wasn’t possible. They could only give me some shells. When we spoke about the popular language used for this invasive species, many explained that they don’t actually use that language in their research papers. They call it by its scientific name, Corbicula fluminea. But when you look online, it’s always described using the colloquial, of course racialized term, which then does what it does.

AF

How did you adapt the installation and reimagine the work when you brought it to New York?

AY

It was installed a bit differently. At the Power Station, one of the artworks was installed on the far side so that to get close to the artwork you’d have to walk into the ball pit. In this other iteration, I made a zine centered mostly on social media and the recent fires in the Palisades, Altadena, and my neighborhood in the Santa Monica Mountains.

The work itself became less site-specific. It had a different context in New York, highlighting more generally the issues of language and how we describe so-called “invasive” species, or “foreign” species, or “exotic” species, and how that kind of language can reinforce certain ideas about policing, borders, boundaries, etc.

AF

I’d like to ask about the 2025 California Biennial and its theme, Desperate, Scared, But Social, named for the 1995 album released by your band, Emily’s Sassy Lime. To me, the title calls upon a certain generation of artists to revisit their adolescence. What was your experience like reflecting upon adolescence, participating in the biennial, and reforming the band?

AY

Most people probably experience a bit of a rough adolescence. Maybe it’s not possible to experience an idyllic adolescence. I’m not sure. My whole childhood was a bit rough, but also kind of amazing.

My private life—I’m not talking about my family life, but my internal, private life—was actually pretty okay. I think fondly about my own explorations of things as a child, but I never had an easy time at school. I was always a bit of an outsider, so finding music was a kind of escape. When considering the positive moments of my youth, I think a lot about music, I think about art, and just interacting with the world as a person. I think when you’re an outsider, you spend a lot of time observing, which in some ways translates well into art or making. But my youth was not easy. And I think music was my salvation. When I started getting out of the house and finding my way to the rock clubs of Los Angeles—namely a spot called Jabberjaw—I discovered my people, who were not my classmates, rather they were adults, even as I was a child still. It was in the early ‘90s. I was a very young teenager, and these adults took me under their wing, helping me and my friends sneak out to see shows. They were very protective of us. There were a lot of drugs, like heavy drugs. They somehow hid that all from us. So we were really lucky, because we were able to hang out in the music scene without getting involved with this heavy drug scene. It was quite an experience.

AF

Who did you listen to at the time?

AY

Well, I liked a lot of the riot grrrl bands of that time—Bikini Kill, Bratmobile—and the pre-riot grrrl bands—Babes in Toyland and 7 Year Bitch. I liked the Melvins. Heavy-sounding music or music that was a little bit intense, but I also liked this over-the-top, saccharine pop music. I liked the Pastels, Beat Happening, Unrest, Heavenly, Tiger Trap. People might look at that music and think it’s ridiculous—people singing about hot chocolate, crushes, perfect teeth, but there was something dark and punk about the music that attracted me, even as it was so saccharine. What else? Karp, Godhead Silo, Nation of Ulysees, Sebadoh. Slant 6 was one of my favorite bands that people don’t talk about as much anymore. I could go on and on.

AF

There’s an interesting relationship between punk and the saccharine performance of cuteness.

AY

Yeah, there were all these bands from that time that had this. I feel like the Pastels were one of the earlier bands that played that kind of music. And there were people who were influenced by the Jesus and Mary Chain, or music from England. That was early, pre-shoegaze music, which turned into this American, overly saccharine pop music, like Unrest. To be over-the-top saccharine also became subversive and like a secret language. But some members of these bands were not saccharine people in real life.

AF

Okay, I have some listening to do [laughs]. But I’ll digress.

AY

Your question asked about participation.

AF

Yes, it certainly wasn’t your first biennial. I know that these large group exhibitions always have a way of being something in-and-of themselves.

AY

Yeah, I’d say that the experience of working with the Orange County Museum of Art was extremely positive. They were so supportive of us, helping us produce the show and think through how we wanted to install the work.

I spent a lot of time digging through my archive—boxes and boxes of stuff I’ve kept from high school to college. I don’t know why I kept it all. I think somebody told me about Steve Prina keeping a lot of things, all his students’ papers, for instance. I was somehow influenced by that idea. I don’t even know if it’s true or not. I’d have to ask him. I feel like somebody told me that when I was a freshman in undergrad, and so I kept every paper. [Laughs.] That was a little bit maniacal. I have boxes of all these readings and handouts from undergrad and from ArtCenter and correspondence between me and my friends. I even printed out emails. I guess email was still a novelty back then.

There was all this paper that I had to go through. We scanned them and reproduced them. Some of the originals are in the show, some are reproductions or enlarged reproductions. It was a really fun time. It was really stressful. I don’t think I ever worked so hard in my entire life on an exhibition. It was another level of work that’s hard to describe.

AF

Because of the volume, or because of your relationship to it?

AY

I think it was a bit of both. It had a “this is your life” kind of feeling, looking at all these things, trying not to read everything. That’s tempting. You have to get through the work, but each paper has so much information packed into a small amount of space. And we had boxes of papers. [Laughs.] We spent so much time just going through it all. Unlike an artwork or a tool, if you misplace a photo that becomes very important to the project you have to dig through the boxes yet again. But it was fun. It was stressful. It was great.

AF

It’s special to have a personal archive that you can draw from. What stood out?

AY

Yes! We thought they were lost forever, and then we found them: these videotapes of our tours. Emily’s dad had a camcorder, a Hi8 kind of camera. We went on two tours with that  camera and shot all this funny stuff with all the people that we were hanging out with or playing shows with. We thought we lost it for good and, through the process of preparing for the show, we found the tapes and digitized them. Now we have them and I’m so glad.

AF

Seeing those videos, reforming the band, performing again…What was that like?

AY

It was wild, truly a reunion. We had been teenage pen pals with Seth Bogart and Brontez Purnell, who were teens back then, too, a little bit younger than us. They probably just started playing music. And now they’re famous: Seth has a band, but he also has his shop Wacky Wacko and does stuff with Drag Race. And Brontez is a writer. I saw that he gave a talk at the Lewis Center at Princeton a few years back. He’s a really amazing writer. He’s so funny, and then he also plays music. They played and were also in the Biennial as artists.

The Linda Lindas who were also part of the exhibition played. They’re much younger than us, but their dad Martin was our friend. Kathleen Hanna was at the opening. Kim Gordon (who we didn’t know that well, but looked up to), music friends like Bratmobile, Allison Wolfe, and Molly Neuman, Becca Albee, Kareem Karem were all there. Some newer friends like Peter Schroff and Jungle Jungle were also there, and art friends Amanda Ross Ho, Anna Sewhoy, Steven Lam, Mary Ping. A few friends who were UCLA art students when I was in high school and then inspired me to go to art school, Pearl Hsuing and Gabie Strong. Andy Alexander.

Pearl and Gabie gave me hints on what to look for in contemporary art when I was a teen living in the suburbs which was super boring, and I am forever grateful. So many friends from different walks of life. How could it not be fun?

AF

Did you practice together leading up?

AY

Yes, we had to practice a lot. When you get older you realize that you take a lot of things for granted when you’re young, like muscle memory and coordination. The idea of singing and playing notes at the same time…I had not done that in twenty-five years or so.

AF

I was going to ask, do you still play often?

AY

No. I do karaoke, but that’s different. [Laughs]

AF

After this concerted look back at the riot grrrl movement, can you speak about how you experienced it then and how you experience it now? I’m often struck by the difference between the experience of practice (and its messiness), and the way that historians, artists, or curators might approach these stories to organize them into movements or narratives.

AY

That’s a really interesting question. I’m so glad you asked it, because I have to say, so often, the historicizing of a thing gets the story so wrong. If you’ve lived through the experience of the moment, it’s just kind of cringeworthy to read most essays and writing about it. The writings are usually so crazy different and nearly ahistorical most of the time.

I was lucky to participate in these certain moments in time that are now being historicized. Everyone’s waiting for Allison Wolfe to write the book about riot grrrl because she would be probably the best person to do it, honestly. A lot of people like the format of the book Please Kill Me. Do you know it?

AF

Yeah, I read it in high school. I received it as a gift when I was just getting into contemporary music.

AY

I feel like everyone who reads that book becomes obsessed with it. There was a book by Sara Marcus about riot grrrl from maybe ten years ago. I remember a few people were not happy with how they were represented in that book. After that, everyone started talking about how we should do a Please Kill Me-version of a riot grrrl book. Of course, riot grrrl was not a centralized thing, but at least there were scenes in Olympia and DC that were very active from the beginning. There were always these spinoffs of riot grrrls, and there are still spinoffs today. Every group could be its own thing. There were no guidelines or book or something to say “this is riot grrrl” and “this is not.” Different versions of it could be pretty dramatically different even within the same city. There could even be animosity between different iterations.

In fiction writing, you have to create characters. You need this type of character versus that type of character to create narrative tension, but if you do know a person, there are quite a lot of dimensions to a person’s character that usually will not come across in a written text. The humor gets lost. The ridiculousness gets lost. In short, things can become overly serious, and people one-dimensional. They serve the purpose of a narrative and, you know, they’re not alive.

I think that’s probably true with history, art history, and how it’s written. It’s often for the purpose of fulfilling a narrative. You think about writing and the purposes of academic writing—everything’s based on an Enlightenment-style of thinking, which is all about hypotheses and proofs. How well your thesis is written is just how much your proof of concept can come through. It makes everything very dead, you know. The thing is not alive as it once was; rather, it’s reified in service of something else. I guess that’s why I’m an artist and not a historian. I like things that are still in the making, still becoming. There’s a lack of clarity that’s refreshing.

People misremembering things is another thing. Even in the process of this show, Emily, Wendy, and I talked about the past. There are times when all three of us had a different perception on what happened, even though we were all there at the same time. I learned this early on when I started a gallery in Chinatown in Los Angeles called China Art Objects. So many accounts of that history were written essentially as if I had no input, which is so crazy to me, because I remember being pretty involved. A few friends of mine who were around in the beginning have told me they felt that I was written out of that history or sidelined as a participant.

AF

I like the idea that history, stories, or however we choose to look at the past leaves space for humor, for possibilities and uncertain intentions. Maybe we as characters are far more complex and not nearly as interesting as characters in fiction.

AY

Yeah. There’s part of it where this is reality, and you just deal with it, you know? People have jobs, this is what they get paid to do. But as an artist, you can always be the naysayer. There’s space for that.

AF

Can you tell me more about China Art Object? I don't know this part of the history.

AY

We opened it in 1998. We had a “soft opening,” although that was not a word that people used then. Essentially, that’s what it was; we had parties there while the space was being built. We had started talking and thinking about it since 1997. It was me and Steve Hansen. I was working for him at the library at ArtCenter, and…I was immature. I’ll just say that. I was probably nineteen-ish around this time, almost twenty. I was going to these art openings with friends, and we were just so bored. We were like, what’s wrong with these people? Why is everyone so stiff? Why is everyone so boring and so serious? [Laughs.] This goes along with my previous theme.

We would talk about how we should put together a show and find a space for it, where we could bring together people from the music world, the underground film world, and the art world and try to have a weekend show of all this stuff. Wanting to curate something was really where it came from, feeling like something was missing. That was how we started.

Then I met Giovanni Intra while I worked at the video library. Giovanni had a space in Auckland called Test Strip. He was close friends with Chris Kraus and going to grad school at ArtCenter in Critical Studies. He passed away later on, but that was how I met him. He and Jason Yates were thinking about starting a gallery and we thought maybe we should just combine forces. I was trying to find more people to get involved, thinking it could be a collective. If we put all our money together, we figured, then we could rent something. We had this idea to start a space, and we went to a rave, and at the rave we decided to do it. This is the part that’s interesting—I think I was asleep for this part—when Steve and Giovanni were getting really high. I woke up, they came over to me, and they said, “Let’s do it.” And I said yeah. But in their minds, they felt like they started the idea of the gallery since I was asleep, even though we talked about it many times prior to the rave.

Now, whenever you read interviews with them, they talk about them starting the gallery and me as somebody who just joined along. But that’s not how I remember it: I’m the one who introduced the two of them. I guess Giovanni must have told that to Chris Kraus, because then she wrote a book about China Art Objects and didn’t mention my name anywhere. The same happened with Frances Stark; she wrote a chapter in a book that talked about China Art Objects and just added me on at the end. They didn’t really know me. Frances just wrote that I knew a lot about music, and it was all Steve and Giovanni’s thing. There was part of me that felt really bitter about it for a long time, and then at some point, I just gave it up and decided to do my own thing.

The gallery started, and at first, we had a lot of music events. We had Mayo Thompson play, Steve Prina did something, Mike Kelley did something. They were all teachers at ArtCenter. After that we had art shows and were trying to sell art. But I left after a year of being involved. LA didn’t have a kunsthalle-type space where these types of events happen regularly. We wanted to create an atmosphere like that, and I think that’s why it did really well in the beginning. After Giovanni died, Steve Hansen was the last person left running the gallery. He was not good at sales. He had been a librarian at ArtCenter prior to being a gallerist, and I think that fit his personality better.

AF

Sales is a whole other thing that comes with its own challenges.

AY

Yeah, exactly. But he did know all the old people from the ArtCenter scene. He was high school friends with Jorge Pardo and Pae White. He and Francis Stark were married at one point. He knew everyone; he was like an old punk. I mean, talk about somebody who knows a lot about punk history in Los Angeles.

When I was a teen, I became friends with him from library work, and we would drive around LA and he would show me stuff, like this is where Perkins Palace was, PIL had bass player try-outs there. He had seen all these bands that I loved from back then, like the Mo-dettes and Style Council at Perkins Palace. We would drive by these dilapidated buildings, where he saw Ice-T’s first show at Radiotron. He was around when punks and rap music were still close, not so separated as it is today. He experienced all this stuff, LA history that is lost, you know? But then, to be a gallerist is a very different thing.

AF

I’m glad to hear that story now.

AY

I was really young when China Art Objects happened. I think it was overwhelming for me, to be honest. Young people today seem ready to be a company. At such a young age, it was hard for me to fathom.

I feel like there are so many things today that ask you to commodify yourself—to create commodities was really shocking to me at that age. And I think the idea of selling art was shocking to me. I couldn’t really deal with it. I was just left asking, what does everyone want here?

Back then, you could still have a job at a coffee shop and run a gallery, you know, and pay your rent with the coffee shop money. It’s really not like that today.

AF

Everything is so professionalized these days. I suppose that’s another shorthand for a kind of commodification.

If I may, I’d like to return to the biennial and ask about your installation in the biennial. I’ll preface this question with a note that I experienced the biennial through images only. I saw starry glitter in plastic cases, sculpted chicken wire adorned with candles, these stacked containers that felt very architectural—objects that not only bear meaning from your personal archive, but are also part of a shared experience. I think the work speaks for itself, but can you tell me more about its relationship with travel and belonging, belonging and dissociation, or maybe world-making?

AY

Yes. In a way, that area was almost like an installation within an installation, which harks back to like this teenage bedroom idea, where I was trying to be an artist even back then.

I had already started working on this body of work prior to the biennial, but it made sense to show it within the context of the biennial because: A.) it was in Orange County, which is close to Disneyland, and B.) in working on this Disney body of work, we also discovered that Martin Wong was the Disney jungle cruise guide back in high school. (Martin Wong’s the dad of Eloise from the Linda Lindas.) I started making the work because I have a son who’s four now and I was taking him to Disneyland—maybe out of boredom. I didn't know why I felt that urge and had to think about it.

I lived in Anaheim when I was like a small child. At that time, a Disneyland ticket was not that expensive. It was a different process of ticketing, so you would buy tickets for individual rides, rather than enter and ride as many rides as you could. But since we lived close by, my dad would take us there. We would spend time at the Disneyland Hotel, which was free. You could ride the monorail for free, back in the day, as long as you didn’t get off and go inside the park. And they had this whole series of grottos and nighttime entertainment that was all free at the hotel, plus you could see the fireworks. I remember sitting on the hood of the car in the gas station watching fireworks. We experienced so much Disneyland stuff peripherally without actually going in very often.

It’s so weird how so many people who grew up in California experienced foreign lands or the idea of other places through Disneyland first. You didn’t experience Switzerland by going to Switzerland; no, you experienced Switzerland by going to the Swiss chalet at Disneyland. And then later, when you do go to Switzerland, you think, “Oh, that looks like Disneyland.” I thought that was interesting. I also felt that I could explore my psyche while entertaining my son.

I shot a film, which I’m still working on, called The Four Seasons of Disneyland. For the show, I just started collecting all this trash—trash that had some residue of memory or specific meaning. It’s interesting, because some people who have seen the artworks immediately know what I’m thinking. People who grew up in Los Angeles, for example, see the Andes wrapper (a type of chocolate mint), and it takes them back to being a child and going to Spires, seeing the mints under the glass at the cashier counter. Things like that.

It’s operating on nostalgia, on memory, but thinking also about consumerism and reuse. Many Asian families, or people who have family members who lived through World War II, tend to collect margarine containers and reuse them. Or have popcorn tins around the house that are repurposed for other things. My dad still does this—he’ll go to McDonald’s and get breakfast. He’ll say something about how Americans are so wasteful and then take the plastic container back home.

For that body of work, I was working really intuitively and emotionally. I did not want to make something logical or clear to myself, but rather work in an emotive state of mind. I was listening to music, putting things together, looking at it, and spending a lot of time with each piece. Even though it may look like it, nothing was made very quickly.

AF

What were you listening to?

AY

Well, good question, and a little bit embarrassing. [Laughs.] I was listening to a lot of pop music. There was a lot of Ariana Grande in my playlist. I was also previewing movies for my son to see whether they were age-appropriate or not, based on his cousin's recommendations, but I got really into the soundtracks, like stadium rock music of the Guardians of the Galaxy ilk. I was also listening to a lot of Sebadoh.

I had found some old Sebadoh cassette tapes and a couple of other cassette mix tapes which I ended up putting in the show. I was listening to some of those mixes, which had Versus and the Magnetic Fields, Beat Happening, Electric Prunes, Chocolate Watchband.

AF

It’s interesting to hear about this kind of psychoanalytic approach to the installation, where your intuition is embedded in different objects. I guess the Ovaltine reminded me of winters at my grandfather’s house.

AY

Yeah. My mom would not let me have hot chocolate.

AF

Because it doesn’t contribute to your nutrition.

AY

[Laughing] Exactly. Everything has to have a use.

AF

Speaking about adolescence, oral historiography, or parenting, I think we’ve been dancing around the subject of pedagogy. I wanted to ask how you began teaching and if there are moments when you step back and think about your approach in the classroom.

AY

I had a few inspirational teachers when I was in high school who really changed my worldview, or they created an opening to think beyond fixed meanings. They created some openings in my mind about what can happen through school—which I have such mixed feelings about. I don’t know if I need to get into it. I think that the world can feel so fixed, until you have this moment where you remember how things become constructs. And maybe things are not quite as fixed as you think they are. I thought that if there was anything I could do in this world that would be useful or helpful to other people, maybe teaching was that thing, although it took me a while to get there. I was kind of selfish and wanted to party and whatever. I did do some volunteer teaching in undergrad, but I didn’t really get serious until I went to grad school and afterwards when I was able to teach part time. It took me a while to feel comfortable as a teacher. In the beginning, you have something like stage fright. There’s a really performative aspect to teaching that I wasn’t ready for.

I have an uncle who had been teaching mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon. He retired recently and I saw him at a family gathering shortly after I started teaching at the university level. He’s really not a very funny person, but he told me to tell some jokes. He was like, “You’ve got to be entertaining, because that’s what teaching is. You’ve gotta make sure they don't fall asleep on you.” [Laughing.] I was just trying to imagine him telling jokes.

AF

Pedagogy as entertainment. I suppose I never thought of teaching as a performance.

AY

Yeah, the more I thought about it, I realized he’s got a point. The whole performative aspect of teaching is interesting. It’s something that maybe no one really tells you beforehand—you think of it as just conveying information, or helping people with their projects, or helping people with their ideas. But it actually is so much more than that.

As far as teaching at Princeton goes, I had a really good time. I really enjoyed the people I worked with there. I think they helped me grow as a teacher. Maybe it’s controversial to say this, but I feel like the school was one of the more positive institutions I ever worked at. Maybe that doesn’t sound very radical, but the people there were pretty transparent and fun to work with, and they were really supportive of me. Through that, I think I was able to grow as a teacher and hone in on developing material to teach from.

AF

It seemed like a very collegial atmosphere. You could tell everyone was very much there for the students.

AY

Yeah, I think the program has done really well. It’s transformed a lot and become much more serious, and the students have gone on to do so much. So many people who graduate continue to be involved with the arts, whether or not they continue making art. A lot of students can’t just become artists, you know, for financial reasons. They cannot just roll the dice—how are they going to pay their bills? It’s not easy.

At CalArts, it’s very different. The pedagogy here is very open compared to Princeton, where there’s less flexibility in the kinds of classes you can teach. It’s not because of the faculty or the program director or anything like that. It’s more because of the funding issues and maybe an inherited structure. But at CalArts, I've been able to develop a lot of new classes that are more experimental. There’s space for it.