Unraveling the Perfectionism of Christmas, Ballet, and ‘The Nutcracker’
I aged out of leotards and ballet—not perfectionism. But tight buns suck. And so do tightly scripted holidays.
I aged out of leotards and ballet—not perfectionism. But tight buns suck. And so do tightly scripted holidays.
It is hard not to see that the conditions in which an entity like ‘Immersive Van Gogh’ thrives are the same as those that devalue and exploit the labor of living artists.
Southeast Asia is a colonial construct, a modern concoction brewed from the dregs of centuries-long imperial conquest.
Fritz Kistel was a reclusive artist who produced a body of work so fabulously unproductive—in the capitalist sense—that I can’t help but admire him: He created for himself.
It’s difficult to enter an anxiety spiral while cross-stitching. Believe me, I’ve tried.
When stage shows went virtual, traditional directors declared that the form was “dead.” They are extremely wrong.
To be female and to bathe is to always be prepared for onlookers.
In art, I was seeing the world. Yet, the entire time, I could not name a single Indian artist in my family’s homeland.
Yet, my same racial mutability also poses a threat: “How can you identify a ‘them’ if it can pass for an ‘us’?”
In Taipei, my disengagement with the silk scrolls wasn’t random. It was learned.
Morisot’s paintings of women up close lined the walls, a pastel perspective at vanity tables and in gardens. My breath rushed in: beautiful.
My mother described the Rembrandt paintings as her friends. I'd never heard anyone talk about art that way, instilling it with something like a personhood of its own.
I had not been erased by the violence I’d suffered, but was changed by it. A new, difficult layer had been added to my life.