From burying her placenta in a military funeral to facilitating BDSM-style group exercise classes, Kim Ye’s performances of gender and sexuality draw from her background as a Chinese American professional dominatrix, a sex workers’ rights advocate, and a mother of two. Navigating power, labor, and consumption in the domestic and public sphere, her latest work reveals the entanglements of technology and capital with our innermost desires. In September 2024, Ye joined Zihan Loo, a performance artist and UC Berkeley PhD candidate in Performance Studies, for the inaugural conversation in the Studio Visits series curated by Lena Chen and NAMI [Evan Sakuma]. Ye discussed past works and shared video excerpts of a work-in-progress, Mother-Fucker, which she created as a 2023–24 Mellon Arts Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. The experimental film explores the intersections between East Asian femininity, erotic labor, domesticity, and apocalyptic fantasy in the United States.
Studio Visits is a series of virtual artist-scholar dialogues hosted by BAD ASIANS (formerly known as Performing Asian American & Diasporic Sexualities), an interdisciplinary working group based at UC Berkeley’s Center for Race and Gender. The figure of the “Asian (American)” is historically constructed through the myth of the model minority: quiet, submissive, and hardworking. Rather than retreat into silence or strive for legibility as “American,” this working group interrogates the “bad” performances, aesthetics, and figures that have allowed for Asian American transgression, creativity, and survival. The following dialogue took place via Zoom on September 5, 2024. The text below, which has been edited for length and clarity, preserves the format of the original event, which began with a presentation by Ye and then segued into a dialogue between Ye and Loo.
This four-minute excerpt of A Costco Shopper Analysis takes pieces from
a live lecture at the Greenhouse Project at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Zihan 子涵 Loo: Kim’s amazing body of work and performance practice integrates sex work, motherhood, care, work, and the provision of pleasure. It is such a delight to witness and is something that I personally aspire to. It highlights all the valences around the word “labor”: “labor” as in giving birth, “labor” as in social reproduction, and “labor” as in sex work. Before I jump into unpacking Kim’s work, I’ll let Kim introduce her work.
Kim Ye: Thank you so much. I’ll be showing my work-in-progress Mother-Fucker alongside older works that inspire and inform my practice today. I’ll begin talking about a piece I made last summer called A Costco Shopper Analysis, an hour-long live performance in the format of a lecture meets stand-up comedy set. It was inspired by a Business Insider article that named someone like me as the typical Costco shopper: a 39-year-old Asian American married woman who makes above a certain income level per year and who has attained a four-year college degree or higher. I took this article as a jumping-off point to delve into both the history of Asian bodies in America and also my own personal and family history, to show how they intertwine to create this individual, the subjectivity that is myself, that fits into this demographic so tidily.
Costco Shopper Analysis explores consumerism through the figure of the deal-seeking housewife figure, who deploys resources on behalf of the family. This was my first attempt at trying to deal explicitly with the history of Asians in America and, specifically, my family’s origins from communist China to the US. What this performance did for me was to translate history into an embodied experience accessible to people, because historical context can sometimes feel so far away and irrelevant. By formatting it as a one-woman show, I sought to make a direct connection with audience members.
Mother-Fucker, my new experimental film-in-progress, moves through three acts in three different formats.
The first act references the historical documentary. In one segment, the film investigates the representation of Chinese women in the years around the passing of the 1875 Page Act, which was an immigration act that prevented Chinese women from entering and birthing in the United States. It was passed using the language of protecting involuntary laborers from being transported into the country for lewd and immoral purposes, aka prostitution. This association between Chinese women and prostitution was already present in the very early history of Chinese migration to this country. In the historical documentary portion of Mother-Fucker, you’re introduced to “Kim Ye” as an expert testimony, a talking head, who is describing the history of this era.
As we move into act 2, the camera follows me out of the interview chair into my domestic life, and there it is revealed that “Kim” is a sex worker activist and dominatrix, and the aesthetic of the media changes from a documentary into a reality show format. Through interactions between Kim and her family, you see a modern iteration of the sex worker that was described in act 1. The second act is sort of propaganda for “Kim” as a protagonist who wants the viewer to identify with her and her life in this Californian craftsman home, dealing with everyday concerns. Part of dealing with everyday concerns is shopping. “Kim” is running her errands. She’s at Costco finding deals and buying things to smooth out the rough edges of existence in this seemingly idyllic nuclear family structure. Act 2 also draws on DOMestication, a video work I made in 2019 while I was marrying my partner.
To deal with the psychic discomfort of entering the institution of marriage, I hired a reality show crew and director to capture the wedding planning process. This sixty-second trailer gives you a flavor of the aesthetic.
Act 3 delves inside Kim’s psyche, as it unravels from this clean exterior domestic space into the psychic gymnastics that she has to do to deal with rearing children, maintaining a household, and being a wife in a world that’s constantly fantasizing about apocalypse and impending doom via climate change, nuclear destruction, and all the ways that we, as the human species, are hurtling ourselves toward obliteration. I evoke fantasy and sexualization as a defense mechanism against these tensions that we live with. I’m inspired by the aesthetic of pornography, particularly the POV shot where the performer is talking directly to the camera, so I’m going to show you a video called U Up? To make this piece, I commissioned sex workers and artists for a custom POV video that addresses these fantasies that “Kim” is having. I blended them via a desktop VJ set to form a forty-two-minute video that was recorded in one take. Here is an excerpt. (Content warning: sexual content and racialized verbal humiliation.)
The items spinning on those QVC-like pedestals are objects from the family archives of Leland Stanford, the founder of Stanford University.
Stanford family archives.
I filmed them during my Mellon Arts Fellowship at Stanford. That’s one element that was consistently there, turning around and around as looped videos. The other element was the commissioned POV videos. If you’ve never commissioned a custom video from an adult performer, usually what happens is that the buyer writes a prompt detailing the fantasy they wish to be enacted. Then the performer reads that and interprets it to bring the fantasy to life. Often, the prompt will be worded in a way where you can tell somebody was horny when they wrote it. There’s often a lack of punctuation and spacing, and it comes in one big text block. It’s very stream-of-consciousness. Here are some snippets from the prompt I gave to the performers:
I want you to be a sensual and sadistic dominant presence in this solo masturbation and JOI (jerk off instruction) countdown POV. I’m a 30-something Asian American woman with 2 kids, a husband, a house. My life is comfortable, but I am haunted by the sense of impending doom related to, but not limited to climate change, anxiety about being a good mom, maintaining a perfect figure, home, and identity a la Instagram, and constantly trying to buy the right things for me and my family unit to solve the problem. In my fantasies. I wanted to be seduced, brainwashed, and degraded as an empty headed pay pig. I want you to tell me to just give in to the impulse to buy, buy, buy, buy, spend, spend no more saving for me. I need to act like a crazy, rich Asian, and look like a Beverly Hills housewife. I’ll never be a real white woman, so the least I can do is spend to make up for it. That’s my ultimate duty. You represent consumerism, and you are going to fill my every need and desire, any void, including my pussy ass in mouth will be filled by you. You’re going to train me to be a party bottom at the Mall ready to get gang banged and wallet raped by any retailer you want. I am just your tool, submitting to and extending your will. I won’t have to be bothered by critical thoughts ever again. Phew! What a relief! I want you to instruct me to masturbate to the fact that my spending ushers in the coming of the Apocalypse, which results in my obliteration the ultimate release. Then I will be the one consumed instead of consuming. Tell me to be a good girl, and fill myself and my orifices with you. Stroke your Dick tits, pussy, and tell me that you’re going to make me choke on it that it’s going to fill my vision, my body, and that nothing exists outside of it. Tell me you’re going to give me a countdown, and I’m going to come for you. When you get to 0, that I’ll disappear, cease to exist. Become just an extension of you, then.
My prompt included some custom clip keywords, which performers use to categorize their clips for buyers searching for these tags. My keywords were Findom (financial domination), brainwash, JOI (jerk off instruction), countdown, POV, Executrix, and Vore.
ZL: Thank you, Kim. I was so excited to see U Up? When I first saw the video, I watched it three times in a row because it was such a fresh and refreshing new way of using the infrastructure of fan sites as a commissioning tool. I’m wondering if you can perhaps tell us why you chose specifically to use this screen recording VJ set format.1 What inspired you to adopt this particular experimentation for the last act of your film?
KY: I think psychological space is becoming increasingly ingrained with technology, given the ways that we consume pornography or aspirational videos. It becomes very integrated in a way that is technosexual. I wanted the desktop to very much be part of a performance, so I used a single take of my desktop screen alongside pre-edited videos. I also wanted to give this sense of revenge bedtime procrastination, when one has little room or space for oneself in daily life, so we turn to doom scrolling, which invites this plurality of voices to occupy us as a way to wind down, but ends up being overly stimulating. It doesn’t work, yet we continue to do it in this addictive, death-drive sort of way.
ZL: It was interesting for me that it works toward a countdown, which respects the form of a jerk off instruction countdown video. So in the last few minutes, the count-down coincides with this explosion—climax—at the end. In many ways, this particular project is highlighting not just fetish of the commodity but also a commodification of fetish that is possible only because of fan site infrastructure. Now, with all these fan sites and the possibility of custom videos being commissioned, to partake in a sort of fetish almost requires an act of consumption. That happens in Findom, and you brought it to our attention in the very beginning of the video when you talk about your own OnlyFans journey and how you have switched to slave training and Findom work. I was wondering if you wanted to speak more about that and this global marketplace of custom videos from online service providers, which is a relatively new phenomenon.
KY: It’s really interesting, because you have more access than ever as a consumer to direct your own fetish and the expression of that fetish with the performer you choose in whatever way, wearing what you want them to wear, and things like that. So you have more control as an individual; but on the other hand, these platforms that facilitate these exchanges also prohibit the expression of certain fetishes. For example, bodily fluids are very much an issue for credit card processors, so in order to avoid issues with Visa and Mastercard, many sites like OnlyFans will not let you show urine or breast milk, or—god forbid—scat. So those kinds of fetishes become ghettoized into less popular fan sites, and people have to seek them out in very specific ways. There’s this interesting tension between there being more expression, diversity, control, and access than ever, but at the same time, the infrastructures that we rely on to facilitate the exchanges are still very discriminating and moralizing. Why is it not okay to show breast milk, yet sperm is everywhere? The other thing I wanted to explore in this piece was our fetish for what seems mundane, or the things that we take for granted, entities like Costco. I feel like whenever I say Costco, people are like, “Oh, my God! I love Costco!,” and it incites this guttural response that’s really disproportionate for what it actually is. Another example of the fetish of normalcy is that most marriages can be seen as a form of chastity training, right? So I’m also interested in confounding and making the familiar strange or fetishistic to reveal the kind of kinkiness that our nuclear family structure embodies in many ways.
ZL: An audience member asks: Can you share with us the sex work and artistic or academic context in which you work? You, Lena, and I are all scholars, artists, activists, working in and of sex work. This person is wondering if it’s a relatively recent phenomenon and how this particular community came about.
KY: I’ll start by saying that I’ve been a dominatrix since 2011 when I was at UCLA doing my MFA. Something that is not often addressed explicitly is just how much art and the humanities are subsidized by sex work, not only right now, due to the economic conditions of education and lack of financial support, but also historically where brothels or sites of sex work were sites of culture. Sex workers are present as muses and as subjects of paintings, but they aren’t really represented as creators themselves. Over time, I’ve just become more confused about my identities and how to keep them apart. I’ve slowly started to be more open about it, realizing that I can’t really talk about the work that I make without talking about the sex work that makes that work possible and without addressing the economic conditions of that production. As an artist, sex work gives me a certain freedom from infrastructures like the gallery system and allows me to make work that might be more risky or unwieldy. What about other people?
Lena Chen: I echo all of that. There’s also actually something very revolutionary about seeing the representation of Asian sex workers in an academic or creative context. Asians are, according to certain metrics, overrepresented in higher education, which is part of the model minority myth that really elevates white-collar professions and success. We all have to be doctors or lawyers, etc. Sex workers, however, are not considered model minorities, so there’s a contradiction there when you see someone who is Asian American and earning a good living, but through labor that is criminalized or stigmatized. It’s important also to acknowledge that immigration exclusion, xenophobia, and racism are rooted in a fear of the Other’s sexuality, the Other being the Asian body that represents yellow peril. And there are ways in which one can be fetishized in the context of erotic labor, just as one can be fetishized through DEI initiatives within the university. In my experience, sex work pays much better than academic work for the most part, although I am very grateful to Berkeley for my health insurance at the current moment.
ZL: One closing question I have for Kim is, what’s next? And what can we look forward to in the next iteration of this particular project?
KY: I just came out with a new publication I made in collaboration with Sex Workers Outreach Project Los Angeles called Promomme: a Sex Worker’s Guide to Parenting. It touches on an intersection that’s very rarely spoken of, which is parenting and sex work, and how many parents work in sex to support their families, and how the two are complementary in many ways but also pose challenges for one another.
The U Up? piece is a sketch for the third act of Mother-Fucker. I want to go back to Stanford and film in the Cantor Museum to fill in the other acts. For those of you who have not been to the Cantor Museum, you should look up the interior because it’s very wild. It’s gaudy marble, very neoclassical, but over the top. I want to incorporate footage from the site into the video. Mother-Fucker is a more long-term project, so I envision probably working on this for the next year or two.
Works referenced in the above conversation, including A Costco Shopper Analysis, DOMestication, and U Up?, were included in m0mmy brain marketplace, Kim Ye’s solo exhibition at Chapman University’s Guggenheim Gallery which ran from February 10 to March 20, 2025. She is currently completing post-production on a feature-length documentary about sex worker parents.
Footnotes
1. U Up? combines screen recordings of the artist scrolling on her phone with a single take of her computer desktop where she opens and closes multiple browser windows that simultaneously play different videos: commissioned clips from sex workers, videos of objects from the Stanford family archive, and footage of Ye going about her day (opening Amazon packages, shopping at Costco, and pushing a stroller).