About mAIA

From: Boulder, Colorado

Major: English Literature major, Art minor, Asian & Pacific American Studies

How would you describe yourself?

I really want to cultivate and generate care within both my life and my art, and so thinking through the ways in which we can give and receive care in ways that are beyond just traditional and capitalist constructions of that. To me, thinking about the role of care in community and trying to think about ways to facilitate that. I did a lot of printmaking the past year and tried to just like, make things that I could share as tokens for parcels of love and community. And so I'm still trying to think about ways to do that within art, and that’s really what I want to do.

How do these themes manifest in your work?

I think part of that is thinking about artistic and poetic lineages and thinkers and family that come before you. I feel like I draw a lot of my inspiration for my work from poems and things that I’m reading and like. I think that continuing that work—I mean, this is very lofty as an aspiration—but trying to continue that work is kind of something that I think embodies—is embodied in—my work. Just in terms of the things that appear in my work, there’s a lot of weird creatures and kind of inscrutable objects, and these illegible bodies that I think appear in my work as comfort figures, not as monsters, and so that care for this inscrutable, monstrous, other thing is another way that I’m trying to do that. Right now I’m trying to work on an installation that’s creating some kind of space through prints that is inhabitable, and that is like a little ecosystem that can be transported and that people can find a home in, and I want to put it in various places and have people interact with it.

Why did you choose the piece you chose to submit?

I sent the buttons piece and the big folding prints. I get into these routines of things that are very monotonous to do, and I think that’s why I’m drawn to printmaking because it’s so repetitive and very labor intensive. But for the buttons, I literally had 20 pounds of buttons, and I just sat at my desk and sorted them into different taxonomies that I had decided and I wanted to make that piece so that people could interact with it, and people were invited to take a button. That piece is very representative of me because I love buttons, and I think that they’re this tender little object that is very tied to how we dress ourselves and things like that. And with the paper, I was really interested in the ritual of unfolding the pieces and having them reveal themselves, and having this kind of disjointed story reveal itself by opening the pages that were folded within each other. And so bth of the pieces, I like how they're interactive and I really want to keep playing with that in my work, and how they invite people to participate in the work.  

What mediums do you prefer to work with?

I’m in a printmaking class right now, so that’s where I’m putting a lot of my work into. And I really do love the really physical material aspect of that, and how it had this history to it. In my first year of school, I got really unto using India ink and pen nibs and at first, I made of a lot of drawings with pen nibs, but now, I’ve recently gotten into just making it with brush and that compared to the printmaking, which is very slow process and times feels very static, with the ink I feel like I can work the other side of that, which is very fluid and immediate and I let things kind of flow from my brain. 

On the physicality of printmaking

I do like the physicality and I just love paper, there’s so much you could do with it—the feeling, the fragility of it. So I think part of why I love printmaking is that I’m very enamored just by how it looks and how it appears and the product of the print.

What has inspired your work?

I think the English major side of things pushes me in the direction of poems and prose a lot of the time as the inspiration for my work. And I think that poets do a lot of really interesting thinking in terms of pushing beyond the bounds of what is possible to represent or know in the world, and I think that lends itself to trying to unpack that in art. There’s this one long poem that I read in my professor, Melissa Parish’s class called Commons by Myung Mi Kim and it’s very long and winding. It’s a book length poem, and she thinks about fracture and the written record in a really interesting way. And it’s in this work that’s about colonialism in Korea and war and migration and language and nature. There's some really interesting things in there that have pushed me to think about illegibility and fracture in interesting ways. I love Myung Mi Kim!

Are there other poets that inspire you?

I think Audre Lorde is a huge inspiration as a Black feminist and liberatory thinker and writer. Her work is so important. I do think about Toni Morrison a lot, and just how she thinks about storytelling and fantasy and genealogy is really interesting to me, like Sula, which is one of my favorite books. 

How does your identity as a person of color influence or intersect within your work?

 I think it’s very tied up in that, but it does frustrate me because sometimes I feel like people of color, especially at a predominantly white institution, are pushed to display their identities and their art in a sensational way, and I just don’t think that’s necessary. But I do think that who I come from and my identity as Asian American and thinking about Asian American studies in a scholarly way is very important to how I think about, again, these ideas of legibility and presentation, and how to create community both within and across different identities. 

How do you think your work has changed since arriving at Smith?

I transferred from an art school, and so honestly I came to Smith because I love to think academically alongside making art, and Smith is a great place to do that. I think that just being in conversation with people in my classes and with students of color, especially through organizations like PAIA and people in my Asian American Studies class has really changed my work for the better. 

What advice would you give to a younger artist?

I don’t have advice because I think there’s so much we can learn from younger artists. I taught an art camp a few summers ago and it’s amazing how much curiosity and creativity kids have. When you let them use art as an outlet for everything that’s going on in their minds it’s just so incredible. And so I guess my advice is just, let them make art. Kids are so inspiring, they just have so much humanity.

If you could meet any other writer or artist who would it be?

I’m going to say Toni Morrison, because she’s a genius and she just seems like a rad writer.

What media are you into lately?

I’ve been watching What We Do In The Shadows, I love that show. Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood—I’m trying to get more into anime, there’s some classics that are, I think, really awesome. And right now I’m reading Tropic of Orange by Karen Tei Yamashita, it’s so cool. It’s a really awesome story about Los Angeles and the US Mexico border and it’s magical realism, freeway fantasy, crazy. There’s an orange and there’s child organ trafficking, and it’s crazy…and very cool. I’ve been listening to Rebirth of Slick by Digable Planets, which is like jazz rap. I’ve been listening to a lot of Lauryn Hill recently, and Haley Hendrickx’s new album, Seed of a Seed. And I’m always listening to Miles Davis, “Blue in Green”.