My work creates an uneasy environment that embodies my love-hate relationship with pop culture and how it simultaneously perpetuates both ecstasy and extreme anxiety in quotidian life. In my videos, I am a colorful and subtly transgressive undercover cultural agent exposing the absurdities of a manipulative social structure while at the same time humorously struggling and reveling in it as a participant, negotiating contemporary social issues of cultural identity, gender roles, and familial and personal relationships. I induce intimate situations between my created personalities and the audience via my videos and installations that are pushed to exaggerated and imaginative levels. My work infiltrates the psychological space of the viewer, giving form to a sort of vulnerability – a nervous laughter. People often ask me, “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.
Yoshie Sakai "KOKO's Love: A Soap Opera Tale of One Family" Seven-channel mixed media video installation 2016 27' x 31' x 12' tall (Antenna, New Orleans, Louisiana) Description: "KOKO's Love" has various manifestations as a video installation and changes form dependent on the related videos and the space. Here we see the three imagined characters from “Episode 2”, who act as “spiritual guides” (Alligator The Great, Mx. Friendly Beignet, Tombstone Tammy) for young Yuki, inspired by my time in New Orleans. This first room especially is inspired by the surreal and odd nature of wax museums, so Antenna gallery, which is the top floor of a two-story house really does become a psychological playhouse for the everyday doubts, anxieties, hopes, and daydreams that come from living as the Sakimoto family ("KOKO's Love" family). The "KOKO’s Love” (2014-2019) series is an original East Asian/Asian American hybrid soap opera that re-imagines the melodramatic tropes of TV dramas to challenge the myth of the “model minority” and reveal the guise of superficial “perfection” of being both Asian American and a woman. It is about a Japanese American family, whose patriarch, Hiroshi Sakimoto, is a liquor store owner in South 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. The series also explores the intersectionality of expectations and perceptions of familial gender roles by exposing the absurdity of the male hegemonic structure in the contemporary family.