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there is a butterfly at the back of your throat

hiba ali — Tue, 15 Mar 2022 16:48:08 GMT

i have been working on constructing garments that resonate sound, the sound of bells and jingles can help with reducing anxiety while orienting us to space through echoes and reverberations. these gloves are sound resonators with charms, beads and tassels that is part of my everyday adornment as armor.

there is a butterfly at the back of your throat

taking care of yourself is a full time “job” i say “job” because it’s about mentoring yourself, honoring the inner child deep within (and in doing that, we can) address the tensions, traumas and phobias we might have internalized and when i say the word “job” im acknowledging that sometimes it feels like a chore to “take care of ourselves” like how i really don’t want to stretch today but i made a poster as a reminder to do it and put it on the wall so i do it everyday that’s why i say “job” because that’s what self-love is sometimes - doing the things you don’t want to do but doing them anyway because they are good for our minds/bodies/spirits/souls … i also say “job” because i’ve always had multiple jobs, assignments from other people to complete, whether it’s from family or work, it always comes at the cost of ourselves, our time, labor, mental health, a part of me is leeched by these different forms of exploitative structures, what’s another way to share my love as a fruitful labor that is not tied to them? … taking care of oneself can also mean taking care of our people, our communities... why can’t that be the default for everyone and every living being?

there is butterfly at the back of my throat, it is part of the throat chakra. throat chakra is about sound, it can mean for feminine and queer people — the need to be heard. people like us are at the edge of being misheard, not understood, or made invisible, when i was walking the other day people kept walking towards me, i felt invisible like the sidewalk was not my space but a space for everyone else but me. i moved out of other people’s way and then i started singing as i walked to calm myself down, “im here, immmm hereeeee tooooooo,” i get anxious so there is a lot of singing. the butterfly in my throat is always flapping to be heard and understood.

often we look at the symptom and not the root cause: my hair has been falling out, i’ve always felt sluggish and tried to maintain a “normal” form of capitalist energy by drinking coffee. my mother and i have had to work multiple jobs growing up —why do we have to work so hard?— there’s two different kind of thyroid “t4” hormones, one that is more easily absorbable than others. when you have hypothyroidism your thyroid doesn’t work or works very little. this can cause many issues: ive felt them as being tired, hair thinning, heightened anxiety (and related paralysis at times.) thyroid-related issues are also understudied because its seen as a “feminine” condition (i.e. lots of money can’t be made off of it and its doesn’t impact “masculine” people as much so why bother?) i feel sad knowing my curls are thinning, and have changed my vegan diet to include more seafood, i also need to change my diet again to low carb, my mom recently did that too, i need to ask for help. it’s hard for me to do that. i want to radically accept myself, my intergenerational hypothyroidism, thinning hair, and changing metabolism. sometimes i get in cycles of self-pity as in “why me, why now…” but i work through it, i accept what i can and cannot change and am committed to fierce self-love. its not a one-time thing but a process i do again and again and agaaaaaiinnn (here im singing) i dedicate myself to learn more about the conditions of my body and paying attention because your body will not speak verbally but your body will show you, what’s working and what’s not — intergenerational trauma needs to be processed (and perhaps, healed) intergenerationally and if those people are not around physically, they are in our bodies and need to be processed from within.

there is a butterfly at the back of my throat and i need to be heard, felt and touched. i long for embrace, the kind from a friend or lover and also the kind from fabric and material, since the ongoing pandemic, my video practice has slowed down to consider the miniature, the small gesture, the token of kindness, the tactile and the haptic and inspired by ayqa khan's adornment works, i’ve been working on textiles, sound resonating garments like gloves, immersing myself in the tactility of sound, learning the daff (frame drum) and oudh string instrument, african-asian pulses of my ancestors that reverberate through meditation, voices vibrating at the back of my throat.

https://h1ba.bandcamp.com/track/pandemic-song

Roshani Thakore is Waiting for 2042

Roshani Thakore — Tue, 15 Mar 2022 16:47:56 GMT

I have always considered myself involved in some kind of politics and being able to integrate my political philosophy into my art practice has helped me do the work. With the help of Yuri Kochiyama, I've also embraced that it is ever evolving.

This is a family portrait in my neighbors apartment downstairs in Decatur, GA. I am in the center around a year old. My brother to my right at 4 years old, my mother to my left at 36 years old, my sister in front of me at 12, and my father behind us at 42 years old. I share this photo to emphasize the influence of place and surroundings growing up. My parents had never lived in another cultural environment and in their mid 30’s and 40’s, pre-internet, they relocated their entire life to a racialized state, a racialized country. At the time of their relocation, there were no South Asians in our community, there were no Gujarati translators at the hospitals. It took a lot of adaptation and resilience for them to rebuild anew in a foreign land. All of that transition and history, with its benefits, has been with me, in my psyche, my spirit, and my body.

Waiting for 2042*

One of my long term socially-engaged projects is called Waiting for 2042*. It’s a speculative project that allows me to envision possibilities with other folks of color in a racialized country. The title is borrowed from Hari Kondabolu:

I started hosting workshops in 2018 and decided that I will continue to do so until the year 2042. In the workshops, I ask folks to imagine the acts of resistance and rebellion from now until the year 2042, when the U.S. population of white Americans will lose the majority status. Centering PoC voices, workshop participants have written about systemic oppression, acts of resistance they enacted, and what it took to act. We then collectively imagine what power will look like in 2042 and consider the events that will occur from now until then. Participants then create fliers of these future acts of resistance to be added to the Radical Archives of 2042, an archive containing the visions of resistance by people in the U.S. from 2018 - 2042. In the last two iterations, the posters were posted in galleries at PSU.

If you have a vision of an event that needs to happen between now and 2042 and want to create a flyer for the Radical Archives of 2042, text me at 646-470-8891 and I can send you a flier making kit.

Roshani Thakore (she/her) uses art to broaden an understanding of place, uncover histories, elevate voices, and expand a sense of belonging, all with the hope of reconstructing power. She uses her positionality and power to complicate, leverage, and advocate with people who have been marginalized to transform systems of oppression through political and community education and acts of resistance. She is the current Artist-in-Residence at the Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon, a statewide, grassroots organization, uniting Asians and Pacific Islanders to achieve social justice. She is a 2020 graduate of Portland State University's Art + Social Practice MFA Program.

Irene June

irene june — Tue, 15 Mar 2022 16:47:17 GMT

I’ve been holding a lot of shame recently. It comes from all different directions, more than I can list. Needless to say, I’ve not been compassionate to myself and it feels like I've been in a downward spiral for the past few months. But that’s not the point. I am here to say that our relationships with ourselves are our relationships with our dead. Or rather, the relationship to our dead lives within ourselves, through ourselves. I’m sure plenty of people have written about this topic before; this fact seems so obvious to me in hindsight that I’m sure many have come to the same shoreline I am sitting on right now. This thought makes me hesitant to write this because in my mind I’m sure I’m being redundant. The cruelty never ceases, it seems. But today I will write it out.

We must go back to the core of the work. The work surrounding the truth that our ancestors live within and through our present selves. Our ancestors, living and dead, blood and non-blood. All as one, one as all, that kind of feeling. We are now, as they all are and were; together in one conscious body. Me, you, us. Every flaw, every perfection, compounded. It’s no wonder my mind can be so crushing some days. I have the compounded anxieties of everyone before. But with that, the compounded joys. A blessing and a curse.

So if our ancestors live through us, what can that look like? How can we navigate through their pasts, us as legacies, carrying everything that has been bestowed? How do we hold their expansive existences within our own? I find myself towards metal and wax to process the inheritance. I find myself opening and chewing my relevant histories, facing them as they are. Feelings will bubble and pour over like an unattended pot of bone broth. Someone will rush to it, lift the lid, lower the heat, clean the mess. Maybe that’s me, here.

Our dead live through us. Or rather, we are our dead. They are ever present, through my mannerisms, reactions and instincts, the cluster of freckles at the corner of my right eye. Or rather, the ball is in my court now. It’s my turn to serve, in this metaphorical game of tennis. I’d like to argue that our relationships with our dead are really just our relationships with ourselves. My mind works in that roundabout way, somehow, to grasp this situation we are all in. I wonder if you are still here with me.

Tending to our dead looks like tending to our living. In hopes to deepen and evolve relationships with my dead, my living, my self. I guess to be honest, as to why I am writing all of this, I am learning to allow my love for my deceased grandmother to be. I always feared her and her abuse. At her funeral ten years ago, I did not understand why I cried. I am not even sad, why am I crying? I will miss her singing and her gray blind eyes. She loved to sing opera.

And I mean learning to love everything about our selves; the mistakes, the cluster of freckles at the corner of my right eye, the anxiety and guilt. I know I am never alone, always together, as one conscious body. I find great solace in that, a true warmth.

Irene June uses sculpture, ritual, and performance to create sites of generational healing and spiritual reverence. The sculptural installations work autobiographically, building their own logics and life energy. The forms present old age and new growth, found and formed, edible and inedible. Using culturally specific materials such as incense, and funerary joss papers, June’s work often invokes animal and geologic forms in relation to their own emotional, spiritual, and psychological landscapes.

www.irenejune.com

no religion but dutiful freedom

Leena Joshi — Tue, 15 Mar 2022 16:47:05 GMT

leena joshi is a writer, artist, and educator. Their current projects consider labor, illness, and desire within the digital as protective/productive sites for minoritarian people. leena’s text and poetry can be found in SFMoMA's Open Space, bæst: a journal of queer forms & affects, Berkeley Poetry Review, Monday: the Jacob Lawrence Gallery Journal, TAGVVERK, La Norda Specialo, Poor Claudia, and bluestockings magazine, among others.

Shaheen Qureshi | Excerpt from "In my loneliness your memories are my companion, what am I to do, something is happening"

Shaheen Qureshi — Tue, 15 Mar 2022 05:00:00 GMT

Spills

Mourning begins in utero. I begin with the alienation I live with that was formed originally by my parents, and for them by their parents through migrations of bodies. Partition and separation. Economic promise and failure. Reasons for a disenfranchised body to not stay in one place. What happens to the offspring of that body to attempt a meaningful presence in a place? Does she have the right?

Someone at the hospital pierces my ears without my consent. I wear gold earrings before I can understand what it means to be a girl who wears gold earrings. I graduate to gold bracelets on both my wrists which are brought over to me from Karachi. They are tiny and delicate. My father’s mother, the woman who named me, and who my sister and I are instructed to call Ammie—the word for Mother, not Grandmother—and my aunt Nagmana, soap up my hands to squeeze them on. I cry and watch my skin turn red as they squeeze and squeeze. Once on, the bracelets won’t come off unless I take a pair of garden shears and cut myself loose. I look down at my skinny arms glinting with gold, feeling like a precious prisoner.

We have big birds—macaws, cockatoos—playful and exquisite, loud and terrifyingly intelligent. The type that are long-living, incredibly affectionate, and capable of holding a grudge to the point of biting you until you bleed. They are my favorite siblings, my surrogate primary caregivers. Our first bird, my brother—a yellow-collared macaw named Tutu—also has a bracelet around his leg. Tutu teaches me how to whistle and sing. I creep up on him while he sings a song to himself after Ammie places a simple sheet over his cage and I poke my head under. He stops his secret song, clicks his tongue, pins his eyes at me, and we sing before Ammie catches us and pulls me away.

At a reading, Cedar Sigo once said a poet can “rearrange a poem, take it apart, leave the poem, make dinner, and come back to it tomorrow.” I interpret this to mean that when things in your life go awry, it’s helpful to know that the poem will be there when you return. I think of Amiri Baraka. The poem permits all.

In her book-length poetic essay, A Bestiary, Lily Hoang haggles for a jade bracelet at a market during a trip to her ancestral Vietnam. She must use soap, lotion, a plastic bag, even popping her thumb out of place to get it on. “It fits perfectly,” she says. Eventually this bracelet is smashed to pieces after an accidental spill.

Hoang’s book is anchored around the death of her sister, who died from addiction, and the dissolution of her marriage to a white man. He told her if she’d just been more careful, maybe the bracelet wouldn’t have broken. He told her, a classically trained musician, that maybe she just doesn’t get punk music. She, a woman of color, pays him, a self-proclaimed feminist, alimony despite his having a trust fund.

My last two romantic ex-partners are both white. I tried to play house with each of them. Now one owes me half of a literal house. The other owes me a sum that is almost unquantifiable. This matters only because if you asked, they would both argue that because they come from working-class white families, they owe me nothing. That the playing field is even between them and me, a Brown Asian woman with a model minority complex.

I spent my day editing an artist’s book. For a while I got stuck on figuring out if the word “sculpture” was a countable or non-countable noun. A room of many sculptures. I think of Etel Adnan. She said the books are houses that she builds for herself. A room surrounded by sculpture.

My body is being pulled from all directions, stretching out like taffy. I’m suddenly taller and lankier than anyone in my family. I awake in the middle of the night from a throbbing in my legs. Everyone chalks it up to growing pains. I take it literally, imagining that part of being alive is to be in almost constant physical pain. Ammie wraps my legs up every night in dupattas so tightly I can’t bend my knees. The compression is a temporary relief, enough so that I can eventually fall back asleep. The next morning, I wake up in a loose tangle of multi-colored chiffon, my restless legs at war with the wrappings all night, fighting for their freedom.

I got a massage by a British expat in Oaxaca with my abusive ex. The British expat said I should get a massage every two weeks. “I work on people much bigger than you, and my hands hurt. You carry a lot of stress in your body.” I muttered “I know,” but felt shocked to hear it from a stranger. As if she broke past my skin and clenched muscles, pulled my insides out with her bare, essential oiled hands and showed me. I felt myself making myself small again.

I think about wrapping my legs like Ammie did for me whenever I now get a slight ache, like that residual dull pain after a Charlie horse. How do you wrap up your insides after they’ve spilled out?

I take comfort in what Roxane Gay says in a recent interview with Monica Lewinsky: “Boundaries are a great container that will keep out things you don’t want to include, and keep in everything else.” This is of course true in life as it is in writing. I see how a constraint can be a necessary container when filling it with complicated content. The chances of spillover are high.

My mother cleans houses. She takes me with her to work. Before the divorce, there were days we had to take the bus again because my father hid my mother’s car. I entertain myself in palatial bathrooms and mezzanines overlooking living rooms three times the size of our Section-8 townhouse. I pretend to clean and sing songs to an imagined audience while in the next room my mother irons someone’s underwear. I get a scholarship and attend a private high school in the same neighborhood where my mother cleans, and instead of going over to giant houses because they need cleaning I am going over to hang out with my friends. The help is another Filipina who greets my mother in Tagalog when she picks me up.

For years, I made a career out of working in restaurants. Despite the glam foodie culture and industry appeal to promising, entrepreneurial types, most of the work lies in sweeping and mopping floors, wiping tables, scrubbing toilets. Like some kind of debaucherous night nurse, I administered drink after drink to otherwise seemingly nice people until the point of incoherence or racial microaggression. On the weekends, the floor was sticky from so much alcohol underneath my Danskos. My legs ached again. The work came naturally for me; I felt it in my bones, the familiar, intergenerational, dare I say gendered gestures of this kind of work. When restaurants closed at the height of the COVID-19 lockdown, and I was laid off, I mourned this part of me.

One of Toni Morrison’s first jobs was cleaning for a white woman. As soon as she got better at doing the job, her boss made her do more and more seemingly impossible tasks to the point of injury. The young Morrison complained to her father who harbored little sympathy. Instead, he offered this morsel of advice: "You are not the work you do; you are the person you are.”

I was very good at my job. Outside of the job, I am also very good at carrying an emotional load. Which probably explains why I am good at the job. But I don’t want to be because I see all the ways this also hurts me. How it has hurt women in my family before me too. I fear I am precisely the work I do. How this fear has shaped me in all the ways I move in the world. I am simultaneously resentful for the position of serving others and unable to detach myself personally from said role because it pays my bills but equally importantly, gives me purpose. Somebody, even if they are a stranger, needs me.

She turns every TV on in whoever's house or apartment we are cleaning so that she won’t miss a single moment of her favorite American soap operas. Young and the Restless, Days of our Lives, the Bold and the Beautiful. I watch them alongside her, internalizing every toxic, dramatic storyline like scripture.

Before Maya Angelou was a household name, she worked at a restaurant cooking Creole food. Later, she wrote two cookbooks and everyone in the literary world dismissed her.

Gertrude Stein’s life partner, Alice B. Toklas, wrote a cookbook instead of a memoir to write about her life. Toklas is not quite a household name as Stein is.

I visited the home where Gertrude Stein was born. There is a plaque commemorating her life on the side of the house with a quote from the Making of Americans.

I think about how a name becomes household. How a house can hold someone’s name.

Carmen Maria Machado’s 2019 memoir charts the emotional and physical terrors of being in a relationship through the materiality and mythology of a dream house, the perfect, sinister setting for domestic dystopia. I did not know that a book could show me a way out from my own terrors of loving gone wrong the way this book could. Poems can be like dream houses themselves—spun out of the poet, but still containing the hard, painful stuff. Sometimes they remain nightmares. I invoke Lacan’s concept of extimacy here. Checking off a to-do list to curb the anxiety. Lists become coping become poetics, a hypervigilance on the sensorial as a means for survival.

I have been in mourning before the recent rise in anti-Asian violence. I am mourning again after these attacks. The ambience of racial paranoia is not new and also not particular to one “kind” of Asian. No one group can claim ownership of this paranoia. Cathy Park Hong writes, “the indignity of being Asian in this country has been underreported. We have been cowed by the lie that we have it good. We keep our heads down and work hard, believing that our diligence will only make us disappear.” Divya Victor writes, “all of us don’t matter at all.”

I wish to show the unsmoothness, the sadness, the joy, the bare facts and the untruths, as my way of refusal. Refuse as excess. I wish to show everything so that I will not disappear.

Shaheen Qureshi is a writer and editor. Born in Virginia to Filipino and Pakistani immigrants, her work has been published in Ewa Journal, Changes Review, Pinsapo Press, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of fellowships from Caldera Arts and MASS MoCA and holds an MFA from Bard College. She co-curates the reading series Here I Am Again, is co-founding member of artist collective SCAR, and works as associate editor at Carnegie Museum of Art.

Jake Vermaas

Jake Vermaas — Wed, 11 Sep 2019 08:24:07 GMT

Jake Vermaas is a 1.5 or 0.5-generation immigrant or a natural-born citizen, depending on who you ask. A poet and engineer in Portland, OR, he co-founded (with friends) the Whitenoise Project, a reading and discussion series aiming to center writers of color and underrepresented voices. He has won a couple contests and been published in the occasional literary journal, but none of those was more meaningful than getting asked to read with 9 rockstar Filipinx poets at this March's AWP conference.

excerpt from: [ first fruits ]
for Exequiel Verry 1921-2007

(this poem was first published as part of APANO's Families, Reimagined project)

you didn't
even need papers
the first time you almost
went stateside they needed
coolies from an Orient
more like the East
Indies

it was
either Alta California
or Hawaii or Mindanao no
difference between them empire
ically so you chose
the latter

you were
not a ward of the
State but later became
one of two childless Americans
the Verrys you took their
name after another em
pire took every
thing else

no longer
a Nunag or Pineda
your family tried to make
you their slave after your
parents passed so
you ran

the resist
ance came calling
but you would have fought
without the offer of citizenship
which was good since
they took it away
anyway

soon after
the bodies were cold you
had to look up what “rescission”
meant your education ended
at ten forget about
benefits

you had
nothing to inherit in the
ruins no papers your folks claimed
you with no reparations paid
to anyone that looked
like you

one spring
break a college
friend joked about seeing
the server's immigration papers
& i ghosted her after but
regret not calling
it out

your boy
R—- and his wife went
TnT in the 80s cause my cousin had
epilepsy so bad it might kill him
but it shouldn’t have
mattered

when we
flew back what was
left when you left to the banks of
the Rio Grande de Pampanga was
it home? what did it
look like?

on my
trips back to your
town later i couldn’t help
but see other selves: half asians
whose first world dads
didn’t care to
file papers

when i
hear ppl rail about “illegals”
i think of you and how you had
nothing
how you always made sure
my cousins and i knew we
were citizens of
your nation.

Ralph Pugay

Ralph Pugay — Mon, 19 Aug 2019 22:13:30 GMT

Growing up in the Philippines, I consumed a lot of comics, television, video games, and Catholic dogma. These experiences influence the nature of my narrative paintings as I evoke the fantastical, absurd, and dissonant feelings of assimilating to a different culture. I treat the images I compose as if they are made up of a language that can be mistranslated, misguidedly synthesized, or overliteralized; providing moments where viewers might catch a glimpse of their own preconceptions by way of encountering what seems familiar. My work responds to ways in which our expectations fail us as we come to terms with the complexity of our experiences. When I make work, I am mostly driven by daydreams, which clue us into the limits of our desires while also hinting at the drive to push beyond its boundaries.

Below are some paintings, drawings and digital sketches I have been working on over the summer. In my image-based works, I have mainly been working with acrylic but in the last year, I have been playing around with ink, which has led me to expand to other materials like watercolor and pastels.

Ralph Pugay holds a BA and MFA in Contemporary Art Practice from Portland State University and is a residency graduate from the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. Other residencies include the Rauschenberg Foundation at Captiva Island and the Joan Mitchell Foundation in New Orleans. Pugay’s awards include a Betty Bowen Award from the Seattle Art Museum and a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Award. Formerly a visiting faculty member at Virginia Commonwealth University, he is currently the James DePreist Visiting Professor in Art at Portland State University. His work is represented by Upfor Gallery in Portland OR.

Grief, together, alone.

Nam Pham — Mon, 19 Aug 2019 20:58:58 GMT

My grandmother passed away.

The whole ceremony, wrapped in the length of three days, felt like quicksand. We released ourselves into a whirlwind of rituals, frantically haring through the must-dos as the scorching heat of mid-summer punching at our skin pores. Wary of accidents and troubles, we leaned awkwardly on the formality and seriousness of the provincial customs—short-sighted from the haziness of our feelings.

In Vietnam, for the most part, funerals are intentional and elaborate performances of outwardly materialized grief. As a nod of respect to the death, they are typically well-curated, following a culturally and religiously determined pattern of movements down to the smallest details: the number of steps and bows, the words to convey your pain, and even the right moments to cry—all in the hope for the death to cross over and the living can continue to live peacefully.

For a family like us whose members enjoy wandering off on their own, this procedural solemnity, by a good fortune, pulled together our scattered shadows: a consolation that for at least once in our lifetime, we know what to do—together.

But only until the ceremony ended.

Grief, after that, returned to be a personal matter.

Till this moment of writing, her disappearance feels like anything but an absolute to me. The absence of trouble and pain on my part with regards to her death—and the heightened consciousness of feeling what I am feeling by mean of not feeling anything—feels like an inopportune vacation from duty. Emotional duty, of course. The corporeal part had conveniently been scripted.

As a compromise, I default to characterize her disappearance in relation to my dad (which is possibly the most grief-friendly way that I could think of at the moment): the three times that my dad cried during the ceremonies, the silence that engulfs each of his breath, the stillness of his body during every break, and how, in a moment of an awkward, tardy intimacy, he rushed to press his forehead against mine.

Feeling the hardness of his skull, I have never seen more clearly the finitude of the expressible part of our love.

And so, while my family grieve for the loss of my grandmother, while my dad learned to accept his motherly absence at the age of sixty-two, I grieve for the attachment that I have lost to my grandmother, the connection to the land that my dad grew up in and the land that I had left ten years ago; for the seemingly permanence of this detachment and the dissipation of any forms of guilt on my part; for no matter how much I wish, our love stops at the hardness of our skulls.

Grief tastes so peacefully sweet.

As I was standing behind my dad in front of her altar throughout most of the ceremonies, I could not look at my grandmother's picture. All I could was looking at the back of my dad, his head and his shoulder, following each of his bows and prays and trembles.

I felt the terror of my own intention to leave him and everyone here.

-Nam.

Anke Gladnick

Anke Gladnick — Mon, 19 Aug 2019 07:06:44 GMT

Bond is a 96 page visual essay that explores mixed racial-ness and queerness within the category “Asian American”. A variety of analog mediums were combined with digital image-making processes to create the illustrations, which at times are more literal and in line with the text and at other moments more metaphorical and symbolic. The text is comprised of selected passages from relevant readings and transcriptions of interviews conducted with friends and family. The choice of readings is meant to reflect my own experience of learning through reading the experiences of others, and I picked passages that were key in helping me to better understand myself.

A free pdf of Bond is available to read on Gumroad.

Anke Gladnick (he/they) is a mixed race Filipino American illustrator currently living in Portland Oregon. Through a mix of collaged analog and digital elements, Anke’s work is both visually and conceptually layered with a focus on the surreal and is inspired by dreams, nostalgia, and a sense of poignancy. Their list of clients include NBC, NPR, and The Washington Post among others.

Teresa Nguyen

Teresa Nguyen — Mon, 19 Aug 2019 04:31:26 GMT

Teresa is a non-binary second gen Viet-Am community organizer and multi-media visual artist from Portland, OR. Much of their work centers in coalition building with queer youth and their QTBIPOC community, and learning how to navigate claiming a radical SE Asian identity. Their visual work explores the sensory experience of self love through food, making snapshot doodles of honest emotions, and storytelling to reclaim diaspora. They believe in the everyday practice of dismantling systems of oppression through tender acts of love: snacks, bad puns for anyone who will listen, a kitchen table to sit at and just be.

Jojo Kim

Jojo Kim — Wed, 14 Aug 2019 21:24:52 GMT

Jojo Kim is a multimedia and handpoke tattoo artist. Originally from Chicago, Illinois, Jojo currently resides and works in New York City. Her practice has been shaped by her love of pop culture, magical girls of anime, and queer dance music.

Ig: @Jojotastrophe

July 2019 Flash Sheet

June 2019 Flash Sheet

April 2019 Flash Sheet

March 2019 Flash Sheet

Ryuta Iwashita

Ryuta Iwashita — Wed, 14 Aug 2019 19:39:55 GMT

Ryuta Iwashita (they/them) lives and improvises in New Orleans as a facilitator/educator, visual artist and performance artist after living in Japan for over 25 years. Contact Improvisation also lives in their life as a base for their creative processes and pedagogy. While hosting Contact Improvisation jams and workshops in New Orleans, they have been invited to facilitate workshops and perform in Japan, China and the U.S. including Tulane University, Seattle Festival of Dance Improv, West Coast CI Jam and several Earthdance programs. As an educator, they have been involved in Wolftrap Institute where they incorporate CI and other movement forms in early childhood education.

Mu(s)hi is an excerpt of a performance piece that portrays a phenomenon of a linguistic Gestaltzerfall experienced by the protagonist who is a non-native English speaker living in New Orleans and their textual embodiment.
It derives from numbing and overstimulating sensations that American-English conversations often render to them, which saturate their longing to be closer to their homeland in Japan. Through ritualistic movements, they open up a portal where an overstimulating language forms a levitating utopia as well as invisible bondage. As a Gestaltzerfall suggests a sense of decomposition in meaning and complexity, the protagonist recreates a somatic language to sustain their relationship with their ancestors.

As words become a soundscape with no distinct meaning,what does it make one perceive emotionally and/or somatically? What textures can one relate to when a spoken language is not comprehensible for them? From which point does one give up on understanding others’intention when the cultural reference and context are foreign to them?

Peggy Sisouvong

Peggy Sisouvong — Wed, 14 Aug 2019 06:45:34 GMT

Digital Dysphoria 2019 - Digital Render

Digital Dysphoria #2 2019 - Digital Render

Peggy Sisouvong is a Laotian visual-artist and DJ currently living in Portland, Oregon. Her work mainly focuses on the spirit and dream realms and it’s connectivity to our physical plane of existence, utilizing technology as a tool of stream of consciousness.

http://soundcloud.com/emojiheap

Instagram: @emoji.heap

Yun Yu Chiu

Mickey Sanchez — Sun, 19 May 2019 23:38:28 GMT

[Detroit, 1992] is invested in many different types of making. While working as an artist, object designer, ceramicist, cook, sculptor, gardener, instructor, performer, musician, curator and graphic designer... skills have started to converge into a polymath with a lot to share. Having lived/worked/exhibited all over, and as a person who has a tendency to leave and stay mobile, the world continues to expand. Yun would like one to consider the state of the planet and the lives inhabiting it more, and hopes to make work that reflects those thoughts.

Takahiro Yamamoto

Mickey Sanchez — Sun, 19 May 2019 23:35:42 GMT

Originally from Shizuoka Japan, Takahiro Yamamoto is an artist and choreographer based in Portland. He has received support from National Performance Network, Japan Foundation, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Africa Contemporary Arts Consortium, danceWEB scholarship program, and others. Both of his performance productions and visual art works have been presented at GoDown Arts Centre (Nairobi), Bedlam Lowertown (St. Paul), Fresh Festival (San Francisco), Center on Contemporary Arts (Seattle), Rowan Gallery (Los Angeles), and Disjecta (Portland). As a performer, he has performed for Morgan Thorson, Xavier Le Roy, Mårten Spångberg, Keith Hennessy, Jmy James Kidd, Perseverance Theatre Company and others. He holds MFA in Visual Studies at Pacific Northwest College of Art. He co-directs a performance company madhause with Ben Evans, and a part of Portland-based support group Physical Education with Allie Hankins, keyon gaskin, and Lu Yim.