Yoshie Sakai
My latest work activates soap opera tropes to challenge the myth of the “model minority” to reveal the complexities that lie underneath the guise of superficial “perfection” of being both Asian-American and a woman. In my East-Asian/Asian-American hybrid soap opera, KOKO’s Love, I am an undercover agent and play every character, as I try to expose the absurdities of a manipulative social structure while at the same time humorously struggling and reveling in it as a participant. The melodramatic and highly addictive narrative genre of the soap opera fascinates me, not only for its outrageous characters and scenarios, but also for how it touches upon the most fundamental emotions and at times spews familiar life lessons and moral clichés that are highly accessible.
KOKO's Love is about a Japanese-American family, whose patriarch is a liquor store owner in South Central, Los Angeles, that annoyingly insists on the importance of having a male inherit the family business and not a female, his only child, a daughter named Yuki. Every KOKO’s Love video installation has and will have different manifestations dependent on the associated videos and the space. My work thrives on the presence of individuals and their interaction with the environment to investigate the loneliness of electronically constructed, digitally mediated relationships perpetuated by pop culture.
As I create more videos and installations for the KOKO’s Love series, real estate and the necessity of housing my work becomes of primary importance. So for Our Prime Property (OPP), I have made myself a real estate agent for OPP that has sought and procured a permanent home for KOKO’s Love so that I would never have to deinstall again. Because my passion is the quotidian, an actual house would be a perfect final resting place for my work. This location, 3718 St. Claude Avenue, in New Orleans, Louisiana is a real place with significance, as I will be exhibiting KOKO’s Love on the second floor, which is the exhibition space for the community visual and literary arts organization called Antenna. In reality I will be taking it all down after a month’s time, but my deep heartfelt thanks goes out to Our Prime Property for letting me live the dream.
KOKO's Love is about a Japanese-American family, whose patriarch is a liquor store owner in South Central, Los Angeles, that annoyingly insists on the importance of having a male inherit the family business and not a female, his only child, a daughter named Yuki. Every KOKO’s Love video installation has and will have different manifestations dependent on the associated videos and the space. My work thrives on the presence of individuals and their interaction with the environment to investigate the loneliness of electronically constructed, digitally mediated relationships perpetuated by pop culture.
As I create more videos and installations for the KOKO’s Love series, real estate and the necessity of housing my work becomes of primary importance. So for Our Prime Property (OPP), I have made myself a real estate agent for OPP that has sought and procured a permanent home for KOKO’s Love so that I would never have to deinstall again. Because my passion is the quotidian, an actual house would be a perfect final resting place for my work. This location, 3718 St. Claude Avenue, in New Orleans, Louisiana is a real place with significance, as I will be exhibiting KOKO’s Love on the second floor, which is the exhibition space for the community visual and literary arts organization called Antenna. In reality I will be taking it all down after a month’s time, but my deep heartfelt thanks goes out to Our Prime Property for letting me live the dream.
Yoshie Sakai is a multidisciplinary artist (video, sculpture, installation, and performance) previously based in Los Angeles but is now back in her hometown of Gardena, a very ethnically diverse city with a large Japanese-American population, southwest of Los Angeles. Since moving back home with her mother, Yoshie has been immersed in how her 81-year-old, first generation Japanese mother entertains herself, which is by watching hours of East-Asian soap operas daily because it is “what she lives for.”
She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2014 and most recently is a Smack Mellon 2015 Hot Pick. She is also the recipient of the 2012 California Community Foundation for Visual Artists Emerging Artist Fellowship. Her work has been shown throughout the United States in film festivals and art exhibitions from Los Angeles to Miami, as well as internationally in Phnom Penh, Cambodia and Victoria, BC, Canada. She received her BFA from California State University Long Beach and her MFA from Claremont Graduate University. She is currently preparing for her solo show this July at Antenna (3718 St. Claude Avenue) in New Orleans, Louisiana.
http://www.yoshiesakai.com