KOKO’S LOVE, Yoshie Sakai
Opening Reception:
6:00-9:00 pm, Saturday, Jan 21
Artist’s Talk and Closing Reception:
4:00-6:00 pm, Saturday, Feb 11
Exhibition Dates:
Jan 21 – Feb 11, 2017

Touchdown! KOKO’s Love has landed with an exciting cast of characters for the Los Angeles premiere of its long-awaited Episode 2, about the ongoing saga of one Japanese-American family with their overbearing patriarch, Hiroshi, a liquor store owner in South Central Los Angeles, and his annoying insistence on having a male heir. KOKO’s Love is an original East-Asian/Asian-American hybrid soap opera series that re-imagines the melodramatic tropes of TV dramas to challenge the myth of the “model minority” and reveal the guise of superficial “perfection” of being both Asian-American and a woman. Loosely autobiographical, Sakai felt it was important to write, produce, direct, and act out all 9 characters from the first episode and 11 from the second episode of this dark dramedy. It has various manifestations as a video installation and changes form dependent on the related videos and the space. For this exhibit, Groundspace Project will be transformed into a psychological playhouse for the everyday doubts, anxieties, hopes, and daydreams that come from living while challenging the notion of fictitious and non-fictitious storytelling.

The KOKO’s Love series originated from the artist’s interest in the quotidian, and since moving back home with her mother, she has been immersed in how her 82-year-old, first-generation Japanese mother entertains herself, which is by watching hours of East-Asian soap operas daily because it is “what she lives for.” The melodramatic and highly addictive narrative genre of the soap opera fascinates her, not only for its outrageous characters and scenarios, but also for how it touches upon the most fundamental emotions and at times spews familiar life lessons and moral clichés that are highly accessible.

Biography:

Yoshie Sakai is a multidisciplinary artist (video, sculpture, and installation) living and working in Gardena, a city southwest of Los Angeles. She sees herself as an undercover cultural agent exposing the absurdities of a manipulative social structure while at the same time humorously struggling and reveling in it as a participant. She attended the 2014 Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and received the 2012 California Community Foundation for Visual Artists Emerging Artist Fellowship. Her work has been shown throughout the United States in film festivals and art exhibitions from Los Angeles to Miami, as well as internationally in Cambodia, Canada, and Japan. This summer she was at the ACRE Residency Program in Steuben, Wisconsin and had her first solo show at Antenna in New Orleans, Louisiana. Sakai is very excited to have her first Los Angeles solo exhibition at Groundspace Project. She received her BFA from California State University Long Beach and her MFA from Claremont Graduate University.

Groundspace Project is an artist-run alternative space located just east of the 4th Street bridge in downtown Los Angeles.
Exhibition hours are Friday and Saturday, 1-6 pm.

1427 E. 4th St. #4
Los Angeles, CA 90033

Please join us for Ann MItchell, The Chance Chronicles, Artist’s Talk and Closing Reception on Saturday, November 12 from 4-6 pm.

Ms. Mitchell will talk about her process in creating this evocative body of work. Ann Mitchell is a Los Angeles based photographer whose work ‘created a bridge between analog and digital’ more than a decade ago, developing the psychological territories of her potent imagery. Derived from meditation, The Chance Chronicles explore the deep processes of intuition played out in process and material.

Groundspace Project is an artist-run alternative space located just east of the 4th Street bridge in downtown Los Angeles.
Exhibition hours are Friday and Saturday, 1-6 pm.

1427 E. 4th St. #4
Los Angeles, CA 90033