Beginning in 2017, Level Ground’s Artist Residency is one of our favorite annual programs, offering dedicated mentorship, training, and production resources to a cohort of emerging, underrepresented artists who each work to create a new project exploring the multiplicities of identity. This program, led by our Director of Artist Residency Leslie Foster, culminates every year in each artist’s first solo gallery show.

In this series of posts, you’ll read interviews with each of our 2020 resident artists: gabbah baya, Emmet Prieto Webster, and Coffee Kang. Having been notified of their acceptance in February, we were fortunate to meet with each of the residents in person before the pandemic. We’ve postponed their solo shows, which were initially scheduled for fall 2020, until (fingers crossed) summer of 2021, and all shows will be conducted in gallery spaces that have strict physical distancing guidelines and COVID protocols in place.

It is with huge admiration for the resilience, patience, and creativity of these three artists that we invite you to delve deeper into their artistic practices and residency projects.

Concept artist Coffee Kang (she/her) navigates shifting personal narratives through media and performance-based work. She sat down virtually with architect and studioBleak co-founder Elliott Lamborn (he/him) to discuss Sometimes Soft, Sometimes Solid, an imaginative space she is creating using soap to examine the fragility of our concept of home.

Artist portrait by Tina June Malek. Images provided by Coffee Kang. Interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Elliott Lamborn: To start, I want to ask about soap. What is your relationship to it?

Coffee Kang: When I was a kid, I remember soap being a very affordable cleaning product that my grandparents would use. They’d use the same bar of soap for many purposes: hand wash, shampoo, body wash, laundry… Over the years, it became more common to use liquid soap in a pump bottle, fragrant shampoo and all those brand-manufactured cleaning products. l sometimes heard from my grandparents that bar soap is better, especially those pharmacy ones that sell for a dollar or two.

So, to me, "soap" was this very organic, simple, basic, cheap, purplish bar sitting on the sink in the bathroom at my grandma's house. It seems to be a whole different concept here now. You see a lot of handmade soap businesses selling DIY soaps with essential oils, in various colors, textured, layered, or cast in dessert shapes. Same recipe, same ingredients, but constructed with different stories. As a medium itself, it’s also fascinating to me. It’s usually solid and strong in a dry and cool condition, yet dissolves and disappears into bubbles underwater, and degrades in heat and humidity. It reminds me of our vulnerable homes, which can be easily demolished in many ways. 

EL: Memories of soap as familial touchstones must be a near-universal experience, in the sense that everyone has a relationship with cleansing, bathing, and self-care. Also, just like our memories and our connection to childhood, soap tends to shift over time. Looking at soap in that light, what are your thoughts on the importance of staying connected to these memories?

CK: I agree that cleansing, bathing, and self-care is a near-universal experience—and also a very intimate one. How the water touched our skin, cold or warm; the lathering of the soap; the moisture and the smoothness. In my residency project, I use soap as a medium to construct and deconstruct ideas of "home.” The show calls for a very sensational and relational viewing experience, and it gives the audience a calming and caring environment when they first enter the space.

However, I’m also taking advantage of the connotations of soap promoted and advertised by a lot of soap businesses—“cleansing your body and mind” or “giving a peaceful experience”—to reinforce the sensational viewing experience I’m trying to create. So in my show, I also intend to reflect that artificial layer of the medium onto the concept of home construction.

EL: There are different kinds of vulnerabilities within homes. There’s the physical, structural sense of safety in a building as it relates to architecture and materials, and then there’s the personal, intimate sense of safety and privacy in home as it relates to mental health and rest from public space. In what form does vulnerability manifest in your work?

CK: I don't think the personal and emotional aspects can be separated from the physical infrastructure. "Home" is an abstract idea of where you find comfort, belonging, and safety. To anchor our feelings, we give this abstract concept a physical form in dwellings, houses, and buildings. These physical forms aren't always solid, though. They’re influenced by natural disasters, failed physical construction, housing policies, wars, gentrification, financial loss—and the list goes on. Therefore, the physicalities and the mentalities constantly shape and reshape each other. 

As an artist who works from their personal narratives, vulnerability is present in many of my works. It’s related to a sense of loss, an insecure feeling, an unstable status, which is constant in my life as an immigrant, a queer, a woman, and as a metaphorically unhoused body. Vulnerability takes many forms and mediums in my work, but it always draws on my personal narrative. For example, I composed a five-day exhibition and performance called Days in the Matchbox during—and for—my “bad luck year,” according to the Chinese zodiacs. To project a sense of vulnerability, I used matches as a metaphor and drew on Hans Christian Andersen's tale, The Little Match Girl. In my other installation, XVII. The Star (the title refers to a tarot card), I used water and light to contain both the sense of loss as well as the personal growth that can occur under turbulence. 

EL: Looking through that lens of tarot, XVII. The Star occurs near the end of the fool's journey. It’s a sign of calm and reflection following a turbulent upheaval, and the star evokes a moment of inner peace dwelling in the unconscious. It’s then followed by XVIII. The Moon, which molds unconscious revelations into recognizable forms. Both soap and homes seem to be bountiful mediums to explore this concept. Where do you think this exploration will take you next?

CK: Each Arcana card in the tarot deck sheds some light as guidance for our lives. Together, they fulfill The Fool's journey, which I think is really about personal growth and our relationship with the world. With Sometimes Soft, Sometimes Solid, the intention is to construct a simulation of a house that is vulnerable and illusory. Echoing The Moon, all of my art has been about reflecting and embracing my consciousness as well as guiding me through turbulence, just as the tarot does. It's hard to predict where the waves will lead my work, conceptually or medium-wise, but I believe that wherever I go, I will find a more complete insight of myself and my world. 

EL: The last thing I want to touch on is queer and immigrant identities. What are your thoughts about these identities and the ways they manifest in your artwork?

CK: I visualized my queerness and my cultural hybridity with one of my recent works, a collaborative video installation and performance with Vanessa Holyoak and Sichong Xie called Almost Crossing/Thresholds. The experience of carrying an identity that is not confined to a binary structure is likened to how we performed in this work: walking blind in the forest mist, getting ready to jump into an unknown wave, caught in between two levels climbing up and down, or a body half-outside, half-inside—but really you’re just at the thresholds as a whole. It's a very vulnerable position to occupy: constantly in flux, constructing, collapsing, and re-forming. It also expands your experience and knowledge. You can compare it to The Fool's journey in that The Fool’s journey never stops. When they reach The World, it's always a temporary wholeness. You re-enter over and over again, searching for meanings and purposes.

Although our identities may put us in places of vulnerability, they are blessings. Through them, we see things with a broader perspective and a larger capacity, even though sometimes it’s almost "forced" on us. I invested a lot of those visions and sensations into my work with melancholy and with humor. The experiences can be universal, regardless of your identity, because we've all occupied in-between spaces. I hope that by listening to my voice and stories through my work, the audience can relate to their own in-betweenness and reflect on our social and natural surroundings and systems.

Coffee Kang is a conceptual visual artist currently based in Los Angeles. Find more of Coffee’s work on Instagram @coffeeekang.

Elliott Lamborn is an architectural designer, custom fabricator, and creative director. Find Elliott on Instagram @sundaychops.

You can learn more and support Coffee Kang’s Level Ground residency project here.