Yoshie Sakai

A multidisciplinary artist (video, sculpture, installation, and performance), Sakai lives and works in Gardena, California. Her work creates an uneasy environment that embodies her love-hate relationship with consumerism and pop culture and how they simultaneously perpetuate both ecstasy and extreme anxiety in quotidian life. In videos, she acts as an undercover agent trying to expose the absurdities of a manipulative social structure while at the same time humorously struggling and reveling in it as a participant. Her 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.

Sakai’s process includes performance. She often creates characters that function as avatars that act out responses to contemporary society, negotiating issues of cultural identity and familial and personal relationships and gender roles. She induces intimate situations between created personalities and the audience by staging videos within installations that are pushed to exaggerated and imaginative levels. Her videos and installations infiltrate the psychological and physical space of the viewer, giving form to a sort of vulnerability – a nervous laughter.