Yoshi Sakai is a super talented artist who is showing at my gallery, @Dog_House_Gallery for funny artists at The Brooklyn Comedy Collective. She was here all week and we sort of worked together since I have to manage working with the BCC inside of their busy space.

So it was super cool to have gotten to know her and her work process before she came on the show. Yoshie is the first artist in her family and also (first) second generation. Yoshie trained as a professur in great and Latin, but at 30 took a turn and discovered art.

Yoshie is very self-effacing, but in my fake-shrink opinion—I think shes self-effacing mostly because she cant quite grasp how successful she is at something so unusual and personal.

I also think her humility is part of the secret sauce which makes her work so good.

See Yoshie's work and more HERE

Follow Yoshie on Instagram: @yoshie_sakai_studio

Yoshie's Artist Statement:

I create characters that respond and negotiate contemporary social issues of cultural identity, gender roles, and familial and personal relationships. As a subtly transgressive undercover cultural agent, I expose the absurdities of manipulative social structure while humorously struggling and reveling in those structures as a participant.

By staging my videos within intimate installations that become psychological and imaginative playhouses, I give form to our vulnerability and evoking, sometimes, nervous laughter. My sculptures are created from found objects and composed into imaginary characters and interior sceneries grounded in both tangible and fantastical domesticity. I use tropes including East Asian soap operas, Hollywood musicals, and the wellness industry to expose the anxieties of aspiration, model minority myths, and filial piety through the lens of the longstanding, yet under-represented Japanese American community in South Los Angeles.

My ongoing project has been an East Asian/Asian American hybrid soap opera video installation series called “KOKO’s Love,” where I challenge the “model minority” myth to reveal the guise of superficial “perfection” of being a 1.5 generation Japanese American woman—the “.5” feeling of not belonging to either the first generation or the second. Loosely autobiographical, I felt it was important to write, produce, direct, and play every character as a performative process.

My work is about accessibility while nurturing human connection. I plan to focus on grandparents and the challenges within a family structure of varying generations in order to encompass a wider audience beyond “KOKO’s Love.” My work can function as a a critique of capitalism’s production of space and ways of being, while also drawing on popular forms of entertainment and media to engage diverse audiences, especially those historically devalued, ignored, and seen as burdens.

People often ask, “Why are you so happy all of the time?” and my response is “It’s better than crying.” Ultimately, in my work I would like to continue the exploration of humor as a complicated intersection where hope, happiness, anxiety, and darkness reside much like our society, a tension-filled existence of both criticality and complacency.