Far Away, Nearby
Amanda Ba is starting over again this September with a show in New York at Jeffrey Deitch, her first solo show in the city.
Back in April as she was painting the Shanghai skyline behind one of her nude giantesses floating down the Huangpu River, I sat down with artist Amanda Ba to talk about what was in store for the next incarnation of her figures. Her first solo show in New York of this work, “Developing Desire” opens September 7th at Jeffrey Deitch. From PISSUE 1, here’s our conversation:
A few years ago, I had seen one of Ba’s paintings online during what I’d call her red pit-bull era titled “Suburban Giantess,” which featured a figure holding a classic tricolor all-American popsicle nude in the moonlight, illuminated by the yellowness of a streetlight and accompanied by a drooling dog, vagina triangulated in the center of the canvas asking, “is this what you came to see?” I was hooked on how the artist enveloped the scene in a universal suburbia while also communicating her figure’s out of place-ness in all of it. In mid-January, I saw a show at James Fuentes Ba curated, “Re: Representation,” examining Asian diaspora, identity and proximity through work by artists she knew and whose work was in dialogue. It was a synthesis of Ba’s eye and made me want to know what was next.
I sat down with Amanda in April (and her dog, Tiantian) in her Brooklyn studio surrounded by her next generation of giantesses, or avatars, hanging on the wall in various stages of completion. In an hourlong conversation, Ba smoked 8 cigarettes and mused on transhumanism, Trinh T. Minh Ha, speaking about China and diasporic visions of Americana—after I made friends with Tiantian first.
Jacquin Cunningham: There was this piece that came out in Artforum last March. I don’t know if you read it. It was called “Men are Dogs.” It was about dogs and Titian paintings.
Amanda Ba: Hot take. We coming out hot.
JC: So hot! It was interesting because it talks about the dog in art as a gender vehicle as well that Titian’s dogs can’t be female dogs because they serve a certain purpose of humiliation. I was wondering if your dogs are male or female?
AB: They’re everything. Maybe what they’re doing in Titian paintings was representing a predatorial or militant force. But that also insinuates that they’re owned by somebody. If they’re next to a Greek god, they’re representing a henchman of that god. If they’re in a Royal court painting, they’re a representation of royalty and civil law.
My dogs don’t have collars or anything. They’re just free roaming agents. I’ve never thought about if they’re boys or girls, but sometimes I paint the penis on them and sometimes I don’t, so maybe they’re boys and girls. At the same time, I try to mix it up. If there are multiple dogs and I’m painting, some have penises and some don’t. They function as a theoretical agent.
JC: How so?
AB: I did a lot of research on contemporary theories surrounding post-humanism. Some of it goes into this topic called animacy, which is reconsidering hierarchies of animacy or animism. So, a human-centric hierarchy would have us at the top, and then animals by our notion of human intelligence. That would render bugs and bacteria disposable.
It’s more about worth and being smart. You have to give bee colonies credit for being organized and it’s more about bringing everything down to an equal plane and recognizing that it’s all behavior on a molecular or quantum level. Even rocks and things would also have some animate value. I was using dogs as an agent for that. Cause dogs and humans have had a very long co-influential relationship with one another.
JC: You painted a few femme-presenting figures that have penises as well. The way that you look at gender in your work is changed by the way you clothes your figures in “Middleland” at No Place Gallery in Columbus a few years ago.
AB: The clothes were particular to that one show, it was about Ohio. I usually don’t clothe my people because clothes are an indicator of time and location. Sometimes I want the characters to feel a little more eternal or displaced. Cause it’s the question of, I could clothe them, but what do I have them wear? And what they wear would be a statement. But in that instance, since I was making paintings about Ohio and it was being shown in Ohio, I was, “Oh, okay, I could put them in contemporary Midwestern clothes that are indicating something about middle America. So, I had a lot of camouflage and stuff that.
JC: And what did you want to say with them in Ohio? And with the face paint.
AB: I was inserting Asian women into roles that I think are more indicative of white middle America. You don’t typically see Asian immigrants that have rifles and go hunting deer during hunting season. The face paint one was about this particular subculture called juggalos. (Devotees of the Insane Clown Posse). I went to the juggalo festival and there were no Asian people there. It’s not an inclusive space. I was interested in how Asian immigrants will be scattered all throughout these urban centers in middle America because there’s not a centralization of the Asian community. Somewhere in California or New York there’s a Chinatown or there’s large areas where Asian people gather together. I think by being more dispersed, there’s more of an impulse to assimilate, but then there’s also always a bit of a disjunction between the way you can’t completely and totally assimilate into white culture that I had observed growing up, but didn’t necessarily partake in.
JC: And you grew up in Columbus, right? And that was after five years in Hefei to live with your grandparents and then coming back. I wonder what you think you might have been able to interface with differently having done that and coming back after the very formative years.
AB: I think that those first five, six years of your life really defines who you are in a huge way. almost Freudian years of development was in China. I actually learned to speak when I was in China. So, I learned to speak Chinese first and then I was very attached to my grandparents. My parents were still in the States. So, I thought of my grandparents as my parents. And then meeting my actual parents, I was like, I know who you guys are. There’s a bit of distance. Also, my little brother had just been born at the time and I felt a lot of the attention was going on him. So, I was just like, what am I doing here?
I think that it made a big difference in my relationship with China and with my relatives in China. I think if I hadn’t done that, the kinship wouldn’t feel as close. When I go back, I don’t feel a visitor or a voyeur. I do feel I have a home to return to. there’s no point in regretting or wanting to change anything that happened. I’m happy to have that aspect now.
JC: I can see what I think is Shanghai in the painting behind you. But before now, you haven’t necessarily placed figures in China.
AB: Before I was not able to spend as much time in China; I was in college and then there was three years of the pandemic. And before that I was not a lucid person. So, I think I would only feel comfortable wanting to place them in and offer some commentary about China if I’m having the active opportunity to go back and learn more about it.
For me it would feel a little inappropriate to be disconnected from China, but then trying to make paintings about it in the West. I think I need to have an interaction and exchange with Chinese society in order to figure out what I want to say. Otherwise, I feel most of what I would want to say would just be informed by Western media, which is heavily biased. Especially because China has undergone a lot of change, even compared to pre-pandemic. So now is a good opportunity.
JC: You just got back from China as well?
AB: I just went to China for a month for Chinese new year, to see my family and also to show my friend where I grew up. We went to Taipei on the way out. She hadn’t been back to China in 10 years. I also had to film the rest of my video that I want to pair with this show.
JC: What’s the video component going to be?
AB: It’s still very loose right now. I am trying out video as a new medium. It’s really exciting. It’s a very different way of working than painting and painting is very solitary and stationary and video is spontaneous and collaborative. When it comes to video, I’m starting from nothing. I haven’t figured out my voice yet. I haven’t figured out my style. Um, I haven’t figured out, you know, what constitutes a good work of video art for me.
The way that I’ve been approaching video is I go out and just collect a lot of footage based around a general topic that I’m thinking of. And then the actual structure of the video all comes together in the editing phase. It’s I’m collecting footage and putting it into a very temporary archive. It almost reads as travel footage.
JC: Travel footage?
AB: Yeah. I don’t know why I’ve been watching it. It’s really important to me, actually. It’s the Criterion type stuff: Sans Soleil by Chris Marker.
JC: A freeform travelogue as they describe it?
AB: Yes, he traveled all over and collected a lot of footage. I think he described it as a glorified home movie about his own work in that there’s no narrative and the shots are disjointed. But then he has this really good narration over it that is basically poetic musings on things that he’s observed about different cultures, the inconsistency of memory and about the passage of time. You can have this retroactive process where you access your own footage as a bit of an archive and look at it again and think, okay, now having this as the source material, how do I want to piece it together?
JC: It’s cool that you’re doing that at the same time as you’re piecing together your own relationship with China.
AB: I’m nervous about what I want to say because I feel it would probably take a year or two of living in China for me to have what I think are adequately cohesive thoughts. So, I think that I have to, let my footage sit and incubate for a month and then come back.
JC: Yeah, for sure.
AB: We think of work as being really active, but I think that there’s a lot of work that happens passively.
JC: Yeah, that’s very true. It’s difficult to let go, especially where you feel so you need to have control over every single thing.
AB: Yeah, and there’s a lot of ideas that don’t make it to fruition. In the incubator, some things die and that’s okay. What maintains your interest after a long period of time is probably worth looking into.
JC: I wanted to ask about something that I feel is happening in parallel In China and here in, in the States and in the West generally. I read that you noted Hefei and Columbus are Sister Cities. And they have a parallel relationship to the capitals or the culture of capitals, Hefei is to Shanghai sometimes Columbus is to New York.
AB: Columbus and Hefei are both cities that are growing rapidly. I feel Columbus is a city with a growing economy in an otherwise declining or slowing down Midwest, Rust Belt. Columbus for some reason is an example of how you can reinvigorate a city and make it into an arts and cultural center and a burgeoning tech place. And Hefei for a while was listed as the top growing city in China in the late 2010s. So, they’re both places that no one thinks to travel to. They don’t really have too much of an historical or a vacation pull. It’s neither nature nor history, but they’re both big metropolitan centers and a lot of people live there. There’s proximity to a coastal elite urban city.
JC: How do you think your work changes based on when it’s viewed there in Columbus and here in New York? Cause I imagine it’s difficult and it can be maybe irritating to cut through this elitism that exists here. I was curious about having a show about Ohio in Ohio and considering the local audience being very freeing.
AB: I wanted to have a show that would be a little bit challenging since it’s speaking about the place that it’s being shown in, and the people that are there seeing the work probably connect to it a lot. But also, there’s a critical aspect to my work. So, I’m interested in interrogating the local audience. In New York, a lot of people make work about elsewhere. A lot of people are from elsewhere and so it’s more run of the mill.
JC: There’s imagery present of Middle America in the background being contrasted with scenes that have an inherent sense of violence to them or transgression with dogs and bodies. One woman getting her head smashed by another woman’s breasts. Within the constructed universe of your work, you’re representing this vision that isn’t designed to be utopian or perfect when it comes to showing queer and Asian bodies in front of dilapidated farms, bleak landscapes. So, I wonder within that visual framework if the paintings exist in a dystopian manner.
AB: I think I’m a fan of pessimistic critique. I think that pessimism doesn’t necessarily mean a lack of hope. Maybe I’m not trying to illustrate theories of queer utopia because I don’t think that reflects where we are right now. My partner has introduced me to this pretty contemporary line of theory called Afropessimism, which is very challenging and very critical, even of major philosophers that it’s working in a lineage with. There’s some pretty cool contemporary theory coming out that’s looking back and critiquing philosophy itself. So, I think it has to do with just my alignment with this type of theory where I’m not interested in painting “happy” images.
JC: That’s a much more powerful statement to make anyway because philosophy always seems to be immune to its own idiocy and its own disconnect with normal people and the way white canon European philosophy from 500 years ago is applied to queer bodies today. Do you see this work as an interruption of that? Adding your own vision of the queer body or the Asian body, into that discussion through your work. Or is it less considered?
AB: I think the work does that by itself anyways. Maybe that’s a baseline and then there’s other intersections with other topics that I’m looking at. This upcoming body of work, I’m looking a lot at construction and urban development. I’m thinking the starting point for this show is libidinal economies or economies of the libido or economies of desire, which function psychologically but also on a societal level.
This will be pretty evident in the backgrounds though you can’t really see them yet, but they’re supposed to be cities and buildings and stuff with these giant women in them. So, I think people do that on their own and when I place them there, it’s already looking at it through this lens.
JC: I think that a lot of people over-explain stuff to the point of it being meaningless, which is the opposite of what you are saying here. Especially when doing an interview, for example, I’m thinking ‘how much do I want to pry?’ Because I guess some of it is always intensely personal. But at the same time, we’re the voyeur watching you voyeur on something else. There are lots of different layers and separations of how close that we get to you and how close you’re getting to everything else.
AB: I think I don’t need people to get that close to me. Yeah, the avatars are my stand in. And a lot of times they’re not particularly episodic of my own life. Maybe the Ohio show was a little bit more and that was a one-off thing.
But I think also I’m pretty aware of the fallibility of identity. We’re in a moment where you know identity is being commodified a lot and you see that pretty openly in the art world. I do recognize that trends come and go, and I don’t want to just bank on my identity for my entire career. I think I’m interested in things outside of my own life as well, so I’m also striving for longevity.
JC: Was the, was the James Fuentes show you curated earlier this year, “Re:Represenation,” an attempt to get out of that identity cycle?
AB: It was—it’s funny. By getting out of it, I also got into it. That was very much a show about identity, but I think the thing with that was I wanted to present something that was organized around artists not themes, I know every one of the artists personally. I believe that all of the work, their essences are in dialogue with one another. So, it’s a way to avoid the whole, blanket thing of, “let’s just throw a bunch of Asian artists together; Let’s throw a bunch of black artists together; Let’s throw a bunch of Latino artists together,” just for the sake of looking at their ethnicity and maybe not so much their work. I wanted to make a space that was explicitly interrogating the formation of identity. But then that opens up another space where artists of color don’t have to do that in order to be recognized. It doesn’t mean that you have to always make art about identity in order to be validated by the art world.
JC: One of the hugest problems with old, ancient, frustrating white people in charge of art is that they think they do it once and that’s it. You can’t exist that way and no one exists that way. It seems disingenuous when these other people do shows that just become this catchall, corrective grouping for everyone everywhere of whatever micro identity, but it still becomes fetishized.
AB: Yeah, and it’s really hard to know at what point it. It stops becoming in service of the community and instead becomes in service of commodity. I think that’s not a definite point in time. I was wanting to do the show as an experiment that is very much actually interrogating that tension in particular. I want to put out a message that I’ve done it in a way that is formed on a real community of people and not carelessly grouped into shows about race in the future. A don’t mess with me thing.
JC: We’re existing in an art world now where everyone’s afraid to say things because of lack of access to galleries and things get taken away from you because of who’s in power; their politics.
AB: That’s happening a lot with the Palestine conflict. I mean, some collectors will blacklist artists who have spoken about Palestine openly on social media or if they have Zionist affiliations or sentiments and some artists that maybe they were interested in before says something they don’t like, they’re not going to buy from them anymore. So that’s an economic consequence of a much broader political event and actually the political event is so much bigger than the silly art world.
JC: I should ask if this is okay to include in the magazine because I don’t know the consequences for your collectors.
AB: Yeah. Fuck it. Include it.
JC: Brilliant. I want to go back to the show at James Fuentes and talk about Trinh T. Minh Ha, the Vietnamese filmmaker and writer whose theory you referenced. I’m interested in this idea of nearbyness and how you have all of these things going on: the queerness, diasporic identity and the layering of all of these metaphors in your work of Americana. And I wonder how you think about it, one, within your work in dialogue with people in your community, either in or outside of the art world.
AB: I like Trin T. Minh Ha a lot. Two films of hers that I’m really into right now are Reassemblage (1982), and then also a recent film of hers that came out in 2022 called What About China. She’s a theorist as well and she writes a lot on the aspect of speaking nearby. It’s interesting to see her put it into practice into her film. It seems something that she really embodies as an ethos in all parts of her approach, and both those films actually are also non narrative um compilations of footage.
What About China is actually pieced together from a bunch of footage she took in this rural village of an ethnic minority in the 90s and didn’t touch that footage for a really long time. She uses this really low res, 400-pixel footage she took. At first, it’s a documentary about customs and traditions for this rural community but then she’ll say something about 2019 in China. So, you’re thinking, oh wait, is this film is made really recently? It has knowledge of these supposed future events because there’s no footage in the film aside from this old ass footage from the 90s. Reassemblage is her critique of Nat Geo style documentaries about African tribes and how anthropology is often very racist anthropology when it attempts to document remote peoples. She’s tries to offer a different way of doing that It doesn’t read as your typical informative documentary. Sometimes she’s just simply stating facts about the customs of a particular place, and then connecting it and a poetic way to broader observations. I think what she does a good job of not making claims, um, which I think a documentary often does.
She’s also quoted as saying like, ‘there’s no such thing as a documentary because in order to make it watchable, you have to make a claim.’ I saw this really interesting ad that Angela Bassett is now supposed to narrate a new Nat Geo type animal documentary called Queens. And it’s all about queens and nature—The Lion Queen and mothers of animals.
JC: Yeah, mothers mothering. Yeah. It’s literally slay nature.
AB: But I think it’s funny that we’re making nature documentaries through this very poppy, feminist lens. Her films, maybe they’re long and they’re rambling, but they’re informative, and you don’t walk away feeling ‘Trinh T. Minh Ha tried to impose a certain idea on me.’ She’s given me a lot of things to think about. It’s how you walk away. And I think that’s an example of speaking nearby is: offering things for the audience to walk away with and think about.
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