The product of a Chinese immigrant and a white polygamist from Fort Scott, Kansas, Ashley Yang-Thompson (she/her), has been a performance artist since the day she was ruthlessly shoved out of the safety of her mother’s womb. She works in various media, from figurative painting and zines to performative pissing (a la Diogenes). Her art has been exhibited at the San Francisco Asian Art Museum, the Museum of Moving Image, the Essex Peabody Museum, and numerous national and international spaces.
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FUCK: An Asian Narrative, Part 1 and 2, 2024
My mother’s formidable home video collection left an indelible aesthetic impression. She documented mundane or private moments with the frenetic energy of a one-woman paparazzi. Whether I was trying to brush my teeth or exercise in peace, she refused to put the camcorder down. FUCK: An Asian Narrative, Part 1 appropriates my mother’s domestic videos and collates them with my camera roll. Perfection lacks poetry. In an era of ubiquitous pearlescent digitization, low-quality images breathe, wobble, and fade.
Guided by 31 years of Asian Hate (not including the inherited trauma of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and many other non-western catastrophes occluded from my high school world history textbook), FUCK: An Asian Narrative, Part 2 is an original visual essay on the Aesthetics of Diversity in America.
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The Pedagogical Philosophy of Ash Yang-Thompson which is in a Perpetual State of Flux, Published January 2024 by Bateau Press, edition of 100.
In the fall of 2023, I dropped out of grad school and started my very own Flesh Walrus University, which shares with PSU a democratic 98% acceptance rate. The Pedagogical Philosophy of Ash Yang-Thompson which is in a Perpetual State of Flux is an instruction manual for autodidacts who wish to exercise Cognitive Disobedience and the Right to be Lazy. To quote myself, “Learn to poop without your phone.”