ANTI-FRIEZE+ LA

AVA means LIFE

AVA means LIFE is an immersive installation built from the living archive of AVA on FIRE, the original play written by Dionne M. Robinson

For the first time, photographs from three staged readings are revealed — tracing the evolution of Ava’s body, voice, and becoming.

The room functions as both bedroom and memory chamber. The walls hold rehearsal fragments, emotional ruptures, and moments of ignition. What began as text on a page has moved through breath, flesh, and fire — each reading leaving its imprint.

These images are not documentation. They are evidence.
Evidence of a character coming alive.
Evidence of a woman refusing to disappear.

To enter this space is to witness Ava not as a finished work, but as a life unfolding.

Lotus Eaters

This 50-minute live performance stages a body caught between two mythological systems: The Odyssey and the Chinese myth of Nezha. Rather than retelling these stories, the work treats them as opposing temporal and bodily logics that act upon the performer in real time.

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Deferred Termination

This project continues my long-term inquiry into migration and fragile belonging, shifting the focus from geographic and spatial displacement to questions of value and time. By persistently maintaining objects deemed non-functional and non-productive, I attempt to delay the verdict of “termination,” allowing what is considered useless to occupy time. Maintenance here is no longer repair; it becomes a refusal of the premise that value must be measured through function.

In systems structured around efficiency and productivity, non-function often implies disposability. As replaceable, consumable everyday objects, fluorescent tubes stand in for forms of existence that are easily substituted and quickly removed. By repeatedly attempting to relight them, I am not seeking to restore their utility, but rather to quietly question the logic that equates uselessness with abandonment.

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Strange Fruitions of Labor 

“Strange Fruitions of Labor is an installation piece made of handmade paper, canvas natural acrylic paint, natural pigments, organic plant matter.”

here, not here 

“This exhibition brings together works by Mei Gong, Erika Keck, Siyona Ravi, Mike Richards, Shauna Steinbach, and Martynka Wawrzyniak at the Reef in downtown Los Angeles. Each work registers a note of the synesthetic, playing with one sense while tickling another. Yet if doubt has done its work, why pause over a scent, a color, or a texture? The invitation isn’t to correct the senses, returning the body to a singular stability, nor to prove it a mere mirage or illusion. This body is a haunting where the sensual can dwell. You are here. And I am behind you.”

Fossils of the Future featuring I Made a Promise

DESCRIPTION PENDING

tired music concert

“sorry I did not prepare anything today: I will give up my art because I cannot make money and feel embarrassed and also I am trying to be a good father ALTERNATE TITLE: tired music concert” is a five-hour-long piece choreographed and performed by myself and five performer artists ranging in ages 5-42. Presenting a portion of this work at ANTI-FRIEZE+, the piece incorporates dance and music to explore my firsthand experience as a father and my son’s growth over the five years of project development, and to investigate my journey as an interdisciplinary artist, and immigrant in the United States.

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The Garden of Digital Delights

This site-responsive exhibition unfolds within an unusually structured architectural space, where the exhibition hall itself becomes an active medium rather than a neutral container. The spatial conditions—dense, layered, and immersive—invite viewers into a landscape of abundance and encounter, where visual, sensory, and informational stimuli proliferate.

Desire is diffuse, contagious, and structurally produced. Pleasure and excess blur into disorientation; fascination edges toward frenzy. Within this digitally saturated condition, information no longer accumulates through depth but through flattening and intensification—everything present at once, endlessly accessible, endlessly circulating.

The exhibition constructs a contemporary “paradise” as a lush and unstable field where attraction, overload, and loss of orientation coexist.

CRIES AND WHISPERS: A REHEARSAL

Director Genevieve Fowler invites you into a work in progress theatrical reimagining of Ingmar Bergman’s 1972 film Cries and Whispers.

CRIES AND WHISPERS: A REHEARSAL focuses on the relationship between Agnes, dying of cancer, and the solace she finds only in the arms of her housemaid, Anna. Inspired by Bergman’s own powerful depiction, Fowler reinterprets the source material through a feminist lens to further explore the female body in response to acts of care, connection and intimacy in the face of death.

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NoBody

NoBody is a two-person exhibition created by Dar San Agustin and Valeria Costa. Each work considers the body as a vessel shaped by violence. Objects stand in as the subject, absorbing harm, desire, and labor over time. Bodies are stripped of anatomy and rendered into non-form, altered beyond their original function. 

Photography made from human blood is locked away, untouchable. Ceramics formed with found materials bind together in unnatural attachment. Sculptural paintings shimmer with artificial blood, reflecting theatrical force. Prints remain exposed and vulnerable, holding accumulation and pressure over time. Transformation is not offered as resolution, but as a process that leaves residue. Violence operates materially through acts of containment, repetition, staining, encasing, and piercing. These gestures function as evidence of what bodies are forced to carry. 

The exhibition holds tension between transformation lived within the body and transformation externalized through objects. Nobody asks what happens when bodies are made to contain more than they should, and what it costs to keep holding. The work does not resolve this overflowing loop. Survival here is cumulative and uneven, marked by continuous damage. The body persists in alteration, reduced to the container. Is it still a body? 

She Was Alone 

DESCRIPTION PENDING