This month's edition of S.W.E.A.T. with Mad Kate features multidisciplinary artist Kim Ye. Kim Ye is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice encompasses performance, video, installation, text, and social engagement. Inserting herself into popular cultural forms, Ye interrogates gendered constructs shaping perceptions of power, labor, and taboo. Presenting bodies as both sites of domination and liberation, her work describes the entanglement between private desire and fantasy, and public discourse and ideology. Through shifting performance contexts, she reinterprets the forces that enforce and reproduce normativity.
In 2023-2024, Ye was a Mellon Arts Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and a California Arts Council Creative Corps Fellow. Her work has been funded by the California Arts Council (USA), The National Endowment for the Arts (USA), Foundation for Contemporary Art (USA), Mellon Foundation (USA), and The Australia Council for the Arts (Australia). Her work has been presented at The Getty, MOCA, Guggenheim Gallery, Wattis Institute, Hammer Museum, Banff Center for Arts, Material Art Fair, and Frieze Film Seoul, among others. Ye received her MFA from UCLA in 2012, and was a full-time visiting faculty in the Photography & Media program at CalArts from 2022-2025. Ye has worked professionally as a dominatrix since 2011, and has serves as Co-director of Sex Workers Outreach Project Los Angeles (SWOPLA since 2019).
photo: Louisa Fang
LINKS!
kimye.com
instagram.com/kimyekimyekimye
instagram.com/swopla
swoplosangeles.org
https://www.smingsming.com/products/promomme-a-sex-workers-guide-to-parenting
