We recently connected with Moss Ying Loke O’Connor and have shared our conversation below.
Moss Ying, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.
The most meaningful project I have worked on was in the summer of 2022. I applied for a solo exhibition of my work at one of the many ChaShaMa locations available across New York City. Apart from the space ChaShaMa provides, you are left to your own devices. It was a daunting prospect to present my work. Especially with the added responsibility of arranging the opening, marketing, installation, gallery sitting, and all the other devilishly easy-to-forget details around exhibiting artwork left me initially feeling somewhat overwhelmed. The exhibition, which was cheekily titled Effeminate Encounters, was equally exhausting and rewarding. The excitement, and more accurately, I’d like to describe the emotion, probably as joy from sharing work with an audience, is electric. Since then, I have continued exploring less conventional approaches to curating and organizing art. I have coordinated and curated two shows at my current residency in TriBeCa at the Hercules Art Studio Program. Firstly, with the Angelito Collective who are a multidisciplinary artist initiative dedicated to radical trans visibility. The exhibition NC7DS is a love letter exploring lineage and self-discovery. The most recent show with Flush Gallery explored Susan Sontag’s seminal text Regarding the Pain of Others. Both group exhibitions have helped shed light on phenomenally talented artists and helped bond all involved further into the longevity of their creative pursuits and friendships.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
My name is Moss Ying Loke O’Connor, and I am a visual artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. I have been developing my practice as a queer artist since I moved here almost a decade ago. I love nothing more than to bounce between different material processes as I dive into a new series of work. In the past, the material du jour has predominantly been woods and fabrics and how they interplay as they are reminiscent of awkward, almost furniture-like structures. I predominantly work in series and find that this process allows me to be less precious about the individuality of a piece and focus more on what the confrontation with myself is with the materials involved. Each work provides a window into a stream of consciousness that plays on eroticism, gender, and the body—playing with scale relatively quietly, requiring a desire for close looking. Thematically, the work centers queerness at its core, but to be even more microscopic, I’d say the atomic central forces at play revolve around how the body manifests gender.
Looking back, are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?
Exhibiting in local spaces fostered a genuine appreciation for the local art community around me. There are limitless art worlds you can be a part of. It pushed me, especially early in my career when nothing felt finished or perfect, to be confident that my art was worthy of being included in the conversation, and a little ego death never hurt anybody either. To develop relationships in creative fields, especially focusing on networking laterally, as these are the people who will be coming up with you. Community in itself is a resource because surrounding and connecting with like-minded folks will amplify your practice.
Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?
Two books have heavily influenced my artistic practice. But, more than that, they have changed the way I view myself in relation to the physicality of my body and the structures it navigates as a transgender subject. The first is Testo Junkie, by Paul Preciado, and the second is Queer Phenomenology, by Sara Ahmed. Predominantly, my work has focused on exploring manhood and how peculiar a second adolescence is. Primarily, when gendered landmarks run at a slant with society’s expected timelines, you’re bound to cause a commotion. Ahmed and Preciado highlight the tensions that arise as one walks through queerness. Both reflect on the seismic shifts that ricochet through the queer body and unmoor the ground on which you stand both metaphysically and phenomenologically.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://moss-yloc.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/moss.yloc/
Image Credits
Headshot by Vincent Farone