kayla tange
Los Angeles , California
Tange is a Los Angeles artist born in South Korea, adopted by a Japanese American family. Boundaries, desire, and permanence are recurring themes in their work.
Message
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, permanence 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, Hwa Records 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.
Tange’s work has been presented at Human Resources, Highways Performance Space, and Angels Gate Cultural Center, 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, Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, Artillery, and X-TRA. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in Art with a minor in Gender Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Statement
I explore how human memory and desire are constructive and destructive. 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. Strategically, I address constructs of anxiety and culture, simultaneously creating tactile, visual, and aural experiences. This strategy offers the viewer a space to address/confess notions about constructs of love, desire, death, and transformation. The gaze directed back at the audience asked to share personal anecdotes, resulting in an awkward attempt to challenge the construction of social and cultural narratives, where shared space is often transformed into a container to examine and experience behavior patterns.
By the agency of being a performer, artist, and organizer, I strive to break these one-dimensional stereotypes by first living my truth. My practice is fueled by 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 investigating these two cultures. This realization came from accepting myself as a Korean adoptee into a Japanese American family.
I am interested in exposing hidden desires and private shame. 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 the 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 the adoption occurred. This led to further examining the relationship to my body, and the need to express my mother's freedom was forbidden, thus recalibrating my sexuality.
I work across a range of media, creating a space for myself and others to speak from the heart and strip away ideologies. I incorporate 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 that lack of belonging creates.
I pendulate within the bounds of representational work that is often quite literal and absurdly satirical. I explore ways of utilizing collaboration and humor to convey feelings of longing. I transform shame stories into a symbolic and valuable medium, encouraging transgenerational play in the belief that other worlds are possible.