about throwaway dolls

about...

throwaway dolls collection can be found here

When I was little, I had a stuffed animal collection and of course a few favorites that I talked to, hugged real tight, carried around as my BFFs, dressed and undressed. Paddington for example told me telepathically that his wool coat was making him way too hot so I tore it off and gifted him a pair of my underwear so he wouldn’t be totally naked. They were beloved to the point of their fur being flattened, dirty, and worn.

Sometimes, at my current age, I feel much like one of those dolls. Treasured and loved at one point, only to be moved on from or outgrown; thrown away.

I also grew up watching lots of anime, in particular ones with main characters whose parent/parents died or who were separated from their parents and so that late Showa 昭和 era (ending in 1989) lofi aesthetic and muted color palette is tied to the emotion of crying my eyes out because of “poor xxxxx” who is alone and suffering. Candy Candy キャンデイーキャンデイー, Ikkyu-san 一休さん, Shoukoujo Seira 小公女セーラ, Akage no Anne 赤毛のアン, Ginga Tetsudo 999 銀河鉄道999, Minashigo Hatchi みなしごハッチ, the list goes on – all orphans or somehow alone.

So this collection is partially inspired by those things.

(You can hear me singing a version of the Candy Candy ending song in this piece I made titled "kira kira pipi")

It’s also inspired by living as an Asian woman in America most of my life and often times being treated as or looked upon as subservient, polite, objectified, sexualized; some mash up between what someone thinks of as a geisha and a delicate, breakable “China Doll”.

My mother likes to tell a story from when I was very young, almost non-verbal, about having displayed “Ohinasama” お雛様 dolls for “Girls’ Day” and me ripping the delicate, hand painted ceramic heads off the dolls and throwing them across the room angrily but also with delight. Fuck your pretty little dolls.

The images in this collection are intentionally varying degrees of gross, messy, and/or horrific to counter the cute or sexy.

In that respect, I was heavily inspired by one of my favorite, still totally obscure artists, Chie Fukao (aka. AAbab) who I had met in person before I delved into her work. She was a quiet and painfully shy, socially awkward person but when I popped in the video that she gave me of one of her performances, she turned into a gross and powerful figure. In the video she is topless while incredibly harsh, screeching noise is playing with some kind of video projection in the background. She takes an enormous bucket from the floor and then dumps it over her head, covering herself in gooey white yogurt. It sort of looks like the horror movie Carrie but instead of blood covering and dripping over her face and body, it’s yogurt. Chie takes the naked image of herself and makes it disgusting. These are some pages below from a zine she made (2001-ish) that touched on that same visual but did so in drawings and photos.

Chie also played with garbage, refuse of daily life as subject matter, patterns to draw or embroider, and she also dealt with making dolls. She is one of my favorite artists, virtually unknown, forgotten, or just lost to the stream of crowded culture and time. I honor her with my work offerings.

One main criterion I used to choose which images to mint in this first batch was asking myself the question, “Could this doll be me?” As I stated in a recent XTwitter spaces, I tend to place more importance on the concept or idea rather than the aesthetics of the image sometimes to my own detriment (although of course I’d like to have both) so from all of the outputs, I narrowed it down to these, trying to be very honest to the question, without letting something aesthetically pleasing enter just for beauty’s sake. I also tried to concentrate on the feelings of loneliness, helplessness, or dejection. There are several conceptual and visual threads in this exploration that started six months ago, so I mean to mint small batches from time to time within this collection based on different criteria. Expect more anger, more horror, more naughty, more inspired by 90's & 00's color/aesthetics, more collage-like, more photo-like... There are many dolls to come.

Thanks for reading 😊 and also special thanks to Emprops for allowing me to use OpenStudio private alpha which aided in the creation of many of these images.