AMANDA BA

Life

Amanda Ba was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1998. She spent the first five years of her life with her grandparents in Hefei, China. In 2020, Ba received her BA in Visual Arts and Art History from Columbia University, New York.

Amanda Ba Artworks

Through painting and performance, Ba untangles her own identity within frameworks of hybridity, Otherness, and Chineseness.

Ba’s first solo exhibition Homecoming (2019) attempted to strengthen intergenerational connections by explicitly drawing from her childhood in China. Reflecting on the quiet tensions of her identity as an American-born Chinese person, she focused on domesticity and memory as mediated by time in paintings and performance works that included the artist jumping into a trout-farming pond during feeding time. Ba has since been interested in the work of theorists and writers Donna Haraway, Mel Chen, and Ien Ang as lenses to explore her positionality, psychosexuality, and post-human discourse.

Asserting her identity as a ’person of colour’, rather than an ‘Asian American’, Ba positions her work within a lineage of persecution in the United States, seeing her role and responsibility as an artist to represent figures bearing similar features to herself. Ba’s explicit, surrealist, and skillful renditions of figures seek to challenge the canon of Western art history, which has historically platformed white subjects and practitioners. Ba’s painterly psychosexual explorations has been described as ‘unsettling’ as she often combines scenes of gargantuan strong Asian women in sexual or violent positions amidst scenes of rural Middle America, a setting seen in American Western or The Plower and the Weaver (both 2022).

Her exhibition The Incorrigible Giantess (2022) drew on Michel Foucault’s 1975 lecture on the Abnormal, which spoke of moral deviance as building upon conceptions of monstrosity and sexual transgression, concluding that those who misbehave are seen as incorrigible. Titanomachia (2022), the largest work in the exhibition, spans three metres and takes inspiration from Picasso’s Guernica (1937) and Greco-Roman mythologies of titans. Featuring seven nude Asian giantesses fighting pit bulls, explores ‘post-human debates on racial politics.’

Exhibitions

Amanda Ba has held solo exhibitions at the No Place Gallery, Ohio; AM/PM Gallery, London; and Lai Shaoqi Art Museum, Hefei. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at 180 Strand, London; Arsenal Contemporary, Toronto; and Tong Art Advisory, New York.

Website and Instagram

Amanda Ba’s website can be found here, while her Instagram can be found here.

Arianna Mercado | Ocula | 2024