It can be a disservice to describe an artist whose art describes a constantly changing self.

1. Kayla Tange looking platonically calm, platonically Asian, platonically a performance artist, dressed in an all-white so crisp it might be paper, in a great glass box surrounded by a respectfully quiet audience, surrounded by an unobtrusive low-noise soundtrack, surrounded by an art gallery, painting with a pale wooden-handled brush. Slowly she’s painting the inside of the glass box white.

2. “I’ve straight-up given lap dances on a La-Z-Boy boy that was duct-taped or like they’d say ‘People were murdered outside yesterday’ and you’re just like ‘…cool?’ Back in the day there was a place in the valley called Bob’s Classy Lady. I mean come on, the name alone—so bad but so great! Sometimes I’m like I think I just worked at these places because—well, besides needing the money there was something relatable for me about it. I was equally attracted and appalled by seedy clubs.”

3. Something indescribable. A sculpture, something like a volcano of nail polish and something like a universe forming, impossibly glossy, oozing, unformed, fountaining, very red over a dry white base. Barigongju Entry Ritual, 2021, unfired clay, acrylic. About the size of a saucepan.

4. I’m in the back of the Uber, heading up Vermont, watching her 2017 piece Dear Mother, which is a video-letter to the birth-mother who she never met. Who refused to meet her. I’m crying. Because of a goddamn piece of performance art. On a phone.

5. “I did a show that Luka Fisher and Tristine Roman curated called ‘A Golden Fool’—the cops came, and everyone ran out. I was naked, running across the street, robe barely hanging. It was so fun—‘Remember that time that we were in this warehouse—there were people covered in glitter and jewels jacking off in the rafters, it was wild.’” 

6. Children and old people using sticks to draw in the sand filling a white frame on a gallery floor. Each drawn line revealing a glow from underneath because the sandbox conceals a lightbox below. On YouTube, we see Kayla in a could-be-couture arrangement of translucent and artful black-and-white fabric kneeling over, and writing in, her own box; then, in another stylishly asymmetrical outfit, talking about healing. Cello music.

7. Kayla in nothing but a blonde wig and white underwear, winking over an asymmetrically dropped shoulder back at the audience, in a cellphone photo I’ll draw a picture of. That picture will be published in an art book.

8. Kayla in a sky-blue-and-white hanbok framed in front of a window which itself frames a daylist section of a Los Angeles street. Lifting colors from bright upright bottles of yellow, red, purple, etc she smears them on plexiglas while the art audience watches her and also the projection to her left, showing an abstract film of the painting she paints in real time.

9. Kayla as a sex-nun in latex, crawling, collecting anonymous confessions on scraps of paper, which become the raw materials for the next piece.

10. “I have like thousands of confessions,
boxes of them. Like, they’re horrible, I mean like people are talking about like murdering people. Like why do I need that in my house? Do you know what I mean? But it was like I wanted to collect the most I possibly could to develop some understanding of humanity …I don’t know that I could do these pieces again.”

11. Something alien and elegant, a figure in a glittering gown, far too tall with a glowing bluish-pale sphere beneath a veil for a head, holding feather fans. There is music from one kind of club, and then a different kind. Before it’s over the creature will reveal itself to be Kayla, again, basically naked. Kayla calls the version of herself who does this “Coco Ono.”

12. “I was like how am I supposed to make objects? I have nowhere to put them, I don’t have space to make them …I found my way into performance from like stripping and stuff because like I just needed a bag of clothes.”

13. “I just feel like: maybe I want to seduce. So why not say something also?”