Kayla Tange (b. South Korea) is a Los Angeles-based multidisciplinary artist working in video, installation, sculpture, and performance. Adopted into a Japanese American family, her work reclaims personal and collective histories through archival practices, found materials, and text, exploring themes of belonging, displacement, and transformation.
Performing as Coco Ono, Tange addresses spectatorship, labor, and bodily autonomy, using dark humor and satire to confront the commodification of emotional and physical labor. Her work frequently blurs the line between art, performance, and social practice, as seen in co-created shows Stripper Co-op, Cyber Clown Girls, Sacred Wounds, and Private Practices: AAPI Artist and Sex Worker Collection at Los Angeles Contemporary Archive. Collaboration and community-building are central to her practice, transforming stories of shame into symbolic value, while addressing psychic boundaries, desire, and permanence.
Tange’s work has been presented at Wexner Center for the Arts, Human Resources, Coagula Curatorial, and Highways Performance Space, with performances and screenings at REDCAT, OUTFEST, Asian Pacific Film Festival, and Performance Studies International, Melbourne. Her work has been supported by the California Arts Council, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, AHL Korean Foundation, and ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at USC Libraries.
Her practice has been featured in PAPER, LA Times, LA Weekly, and X-TRA.
Artist Statement
Through video, installation, sculpture, and more directly with performance, a large portion of my work addresses structures of spectatorship while redefining ancestral trauma through public and private rituals. I am interested in exploring the way human memory is constructive and destructive. Strategically, I address constructs of anxiety and desire, simultaneously creating tactile, visual, and aural experiences. This strategy offers the viewer a space to address/confess notions of love, desire, death, and transformation. The gaze is directed back at the audience, where the viewer is asked to consider personal anecdotes, resulting in an uncomfortable attempt to challenge the construction of social and cultural narratives, where shared space is often transformed into a container to examine and experience patterns of behavior.
By the agency of my work as a performer, artist, and organizer, I strive to break these one-dimensional stereotypes, by first living my truth. This came in the form of first accepting my own existence as a Korean adoptee into a Japanese American family and the circumstances and societal expectations under which my adoption occurred. My work is fueled by ancestral research and collaboration, often communicating what it feels like to be tied between Japanese-American parents who survived the internment camps and my forgotten Korean heritage, evolving into an investigation between two cultures I was raised in.
I am interested in exposing hidden desires and private shames. I contend with the possibility of becoming an emotional confessor and fetishized redeemer. Not because I am another voyeur, instead, I’m held captive by the unstated psychic barriers of social constructs that have silenced my ancestors into becoming the status quo. However, my own life is not free from investigation. Dear Mother (2017-2020) a visual letter to my birth mother documents the journey of defining my identity, the circumstances, and the politics under which I was adopted under. This lead me to further examine my relationship to my body and the need to express the freedom that my own mother was forbidden, thus recalibrating my own sexuality. Through this exploration, I have found ways in which to forgive. Through this forgiveness, I found ways to hold space. Through this space, I encourage performers of the entire Asian diaspora spectrum to tell their stories.
I make work across a range of media creating a space for myself to strip away ideologies, incorporating Valie Export’s ideas on the body as an artistic material generating something new by exporting identity. In addition, I intend to further expand on my experiences of displacement, adoption, the absence of mothering, and the perpetual limbo lack of belonging creates.
Furthermore, I pendulate within the bounds of representational work that is often quite literal and absurdly satirical while exploring ways of utilizing collaboration and humor to convey feelings of longing while transforming stories of shame into a symbolic and valuable medium, encouraging transgenerational play, in the belief that other worlds are possible.