A participatory installation where visitors were invited to "blow up" hopes with their breath or exhale worries into magic goo bubbles and place them on twin cone sculptures- one labeled “breathe hope” and the other with “exhale fear.” Inspired in material by feminist, Korean feminist artist Jung Kang-Ja’s 1970s nude performance and the Plum Village mindfulness breath practice, the piece explores breath as a site of vulnerability and transformation. Audiences are encouraged to notice the fragile accumulation of a collective emotional landscape.

“Encounter the library in a new way in this participatory activation! In this event, book shelves become sites where new treasures can be discovered and celebrated! Library patrons of all ages are welcome to “unwrap” the shelves of the library and find a new way to appreciate the gift that is books.”

This installation invited participants of all ages to encounter the library in a new sensory way. Tearing down the barriers between and among shelves, participants embodied spirits of freedom. Transposing the experience of opening a gift onto the shelves of the library fostered interactions between people and books with a renewed exuberant joy fir discovery. Amidst the event, participants reminisced about some books they’d uncovered and had not read in a while while others cleverly made “snowballs” out of the torn remenants- effectively doubling the fun!

Participatory Site Activation commissioned by and made in collaboration with the Downey City Library for Banned Books Week 2023.

“Knowledge flows from human to human in many forms– through stories, traditions, songs, and of course, books. Like water, knowledge is nourishing to life and is a force that is constantly cycling through different phases. It's an infinite power that cannot be contained. Coupled with quotes from the illuminating books in this aisle, this piece celebrates the sacred freedom of knowledge. Step through the waterfall and saturate yourself with new knowing.”

Visitors were invited to enter this aisle to find the banned books that this piece quoted from.

Single-channel video installation made as a commission in collaboration with Downey City Library for Banned Books Week 2023.

Apples play key roles in biblical and mythical stories. It’s a tricky fruit that holds many dualities. Often, it embodies a fateful, tantalizing poison. Sagwa means both “apple” and “sorry” in Korean, incidentally summing up how Asian parents use offerings of fruit in lieu of apologies or working through complex emotions with their children. A sweet peace offering masks a bitter situation. Made of toxic resin, acrylic ink, and psychiatric pills, this piece addresses the generational emotional neglect in families that leads countless Asian Americans to develop mental illnesses and fall into the opportunistic traps of the psychiatric industrial complex.

“In modern life, these transitions are becoming ever more unrecognizable and impossible to experience. We have grown very poor in threshold experiences.” - Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

Collaboration with Margaret Oakley for Ultra! at the Torrance Art Museum parking lot.

This work explores the sacerdotal function of a threshold to offer a formalized, ritualistic experience of transition in order to punctuate the initiation of a post-Covid era. Our threshold is constructed in reference to a triumphal arch, an architectural trope of Western art history which demarcates victory and the passage of time. The postliminalthreshold is a materialization of the politics of disposability. Shored up with car tires, the walls of this arch are lovingly constructed through the repetition of a few ubiquitous single-use items that permeate our lives, including plastic cups, recycled material grocery bags, compostable clamshells, and the original takeout plates, plant leaves. You are invited to pass through a structure created by capitalism and convenience, reaching toward a transformative experience that juxtaposes the sacred sense of victory of having lived through a harrowing time with the profane detritus of empire.

Executed on National Recycling Day, My PET (Our PET) was a piece born out of UCI's own plastic consumption and was enlivened in order to question the temporality of plastics in our everyday lives. This performance held a participatory aspect since it called for anyone in the community to become more conscious about their use of single-use plastic by collecting Category 1 recyclables for 7 weeks. PET is an acronym for the polyethylene terephalate used in Category 1 items, and it serves as the title in order to expose personal bonds with plastic while also keeping the threat of environmental harm at hand. Traveling on UCI Ring Road's circular path mimicked Earth's elliptical movements through time and space as well as the direction in which the Pacific Ocean gyres flow and collect "garbage patches". As a performance artist, my body beneath the plastics served as a metaphor for the strained Earth's systems that are desperately trying to continue on. The spectacle of the event criticized ways in which the body politic reacts (or doesn't react) to dire situations, particularly with social media clips that were collected from public stories posted to SnapChat’s SnapMap. 

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Something found in everyday life is the dough of nutritious bread, and the creation of food is often considered a woman's role. For my performance titled "Need," I kneaded dough made from 300 pounds of flour as a metaphor for the body and soul shaped by gender expectations and pressures. By engaging with an amassed quantity of dough and kneading into it items associated with gendered expectations of femininity, such as makeup or definitively becoming a mother, I wish to show how societal "wants," or distortions of feminine identity, have become mistaken for "needs" or mandates.

The dough represents what someone actually "needs," such as food. Instead of focusing on the superficial and often inescapable messaging of dominant socialization, the piece recognizes the trials that cause one to stray from realizing one's true self and offers hope that, despite those forces being kneaded into our sinews and minds, we can accept ourselves, grotesquely tainted and all, appreciating life that exists outside of limiting identity categories.

Materials: hair, birth control, pregnancy tests, plushies, makeup, shoujo manga, hair accessories

On April 5th, 2018, another iteration of Need was staged at the 14th Undergraduate Juried Exhibition in UCI's University Art Gallery.

Video Projection on wooden Sculpture with nails

Manifesting a spirit inside of an earthly vessel is a common practice in many religions. Sokushinbutsu is an ascetic practice that allows one to vest the spirit of the Buddha of Light in one’s own flesh. Parallel developments of religions across the world are phenomenon that can be traced through the history of visual arts. Particularly addressing Buddhism and Catholicism, there is a “savior of mankind” that is known to be compassionate and transcend the earthly world. These religious figures are known as Jizo and Jesus from Amidism and Catholicism, respectively. They are a source of “light” to their followers and their veneration is ritualized with the employment of light and art forms. Both religions relied heavily on visual objects in order to transmit their sacred ideologies.

Wood and its materiality are extremely important to the narrative of Jesus’ life and is the medium through which Buddhism and Catholic art was made. Reliquaries in the shape of the Jizo and Jesus serve as icons that index the actual people that existed. These relics were not only seen to represent these holy figures, but they were believed to hold the actual manifestations of divine power associated with them. By projecting onto the materiality of a wooden sculpture that represents indexes of Jizo and Jesus’ iconography, the videos will serve as the “enlivening” element by which the religious item will become sacralized. This process will not only visualize the degree of energy people believed relics to have, but it will also highlight the crucial process that transforms a mere object into that of worship.

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Collaboration with UCI Dance Department’s Dr. S. Ama Wray, as Dance Visions’ first ever scenic designer. Set for “Hire” Knowledge and the Anthropocene. Inspired by My PET (Our PET); it questions the pedagogy of how society perceives value by juxtaposing classroom items with plastic “trash”. Spiral represents the oscillation and undeterminable waxing and waning of chaos and order in the world. The shape also represents the ocean gyres that accumulate plastic into “garbage patches” in Earth’s oceans. My job encompassed designing the set and chairs, constructing the chairs, assisting in narrative and thematic conceptualizations with the choreographer, and fine tuning the timings of all of the technical elements. Show dates: February 21 - 23, 2019 @ 8:00 pm in the Irvine Barclay Theater.

Hear more from the Choreographer, Dr. S. Ama Wray HERE

Taryn Lee and Vivian To

Projection on Cosmetic Cabinet

What started off as a broad investigation into the cosmetic beauty culture narrowed itself down into a sinister, yet ironic play of how advertisements promise higher self-esteem  by targeting peoples’ insecurities. The culture of media targets young women globally, but due to our intimate cultural ties with Korean culture, we honed in on the intense beauty industry of “K-Beauty”. This project incorporates a popular, upbeat make-up commercial that embodies the seemingly innocent messages that subliminally pervert ideas of self-confidence by necessitating a purely cosmetic product.  

The space we projected onto was a cosmetic cabinet in an apartment on campus. We felt that the domestic implement would conjure a sense of intimacy between the viewer’s experiences with it. A cabinet called to be activated by females’ close relationship with storing their host of beauty products, and thus insecurities, into it’s ordinary structure.

There are four media projections that are played at the same time. As both women from Asian cultures, we decided to use a Korean makeup advertisement as the main media in the middle to effectively portray what some Asian beauty standards are like. Using the router and LFO dials, the top and bottom projections are accelerated videos of different Asian products being placed on a shelf. The content of these videos complement how advertisements influence people, especially female consumers, to constantly buy beauty products. The fast-forwarded effect shows how there is no limit to the number of products consumers will frantically buy. In addition, we intertwined clips of ourselves “looking into the mirror” in the advertisement to show how no matter how many products we end up buying, it may not make us happier or more confident. Instead, it will only increase our insecurities and lower our self-esteem as we depend more on these products. We also edited the saturation of the main media to go back and forth between grayscale and color to show how everything is not as easy and happy as the advertisement makes it out to be.

The idea of this piece stems from the simple synthesis of the cultures that make up who I am. Being of Chinese and Korean descent, I have grown up with the shared cultural traditions of both sides. Adding to the mix, I have always been interested in Japanese culture since I was a young child watching the Ghibli films my mom would put on. As just my second exploration into performance art, I took this piece very literally, but wasted no efforts in displaying my thoughts. Playing a video of Chinese fireworks in the background, wearing a Korean hairpiece, and dressing in a kimono, I wanted to create a triad of references towards New Year rituals and celebrations that take place. Multicolored foam lights acted as metaphorical sparklers and firework displays common in Asian celebrations. Culture with a modern twist, I was intent on creating a spectacle for the audience. 

My first performance piece as a first year was a reflection of how I felt as a child under the constant jurisdiction of my parents. All of my honors, awards, and "success" were layed out on the floor for anyone to come up and tape societal value onto me. These accomplishments bear my name, and I did work hard for them, but I believed that without the guidance and fiscal support of my parents- I wouldn't have even attempted to achieve them. Never quite knowing what my value was as an individual devoid of these emblems of accomplishment, I felt like a doll that took on whatever my makers wished for me to have while feeling hollow all the while. Playing "Twinkle Twinkle" in pizzicato (despite my 12 year musical experience) and dressing in all white clothing set the tone of childhood memories while the crate I stood on referenced  more sinister motifs of objectification and the commodification of children. Interaction was of utmost importance in this piece since my lack of agency over what the audience would put onto me was an integral part of my message. Someone even put a part of my competition uniform over my head, which was not expected, but heightened the idea of an uncontrollable fate all the more. 

Inspired and enraged by Claudia Rankine's book, Citizen, I created this charming little book in order to reveal the disarming and destruction power that language holds. In her book, Rankine illustrates and critically analyzes micro-aggressions against the black community present in personal and global events. Like Citizen, I hope the words and images I utilized create a sense of tension and discomfort in my viewers.

A psychedelic background blurs the lines of dream and reality in this surreal exploration using vitriolic Copic colors. 

The Goddess Hestia with her (imagined) pet mouse in a warming atmosphere that characterizes the pair's endearing relationship. 

Portrait using Copic markers and ink in order to illustrate the psychological workings of the subject.