Amia, how has your journey been so far with your work? Was it easy achieving the creative process you have today?

It has been long, unruly, twisty, and unpredictably slippery at times, but I would not have it any other way. My process has been guided through searching for moments that trigger my creative spirit. These moments are the catalyst for my motivation. I get excited when these senses are tickled simultaneously like intellect, feelings, sensory, emotions, beauty, and tension, to name a few. When all of these are activated as I work, I know I am on the right path. If they are not, I keep searching.

Having a Japanese-American profile, in what ways do your cultural background and upbringing influence your art and the way you make it?

I think that my early acknowledgement of my childhood and the feeling of not belonging encouraged a propensity to imagine and create worlds where I did feel I belonged.

I began to develop my own relationship with my environment rather than a relationship that was heralded by my parents, teachers, or peers. 

I grew up in a multicultural household isolated within a vast sea of homogeneity, so differences, misunderstandings, and uncertainties were regular companions. This gave way to always feeling and knowing I was sutured of diverse and often disparate parts that do not fit into the ways the world told me they should.

When the world told me that I did not make sense, I began the process of liberating myself from their idea of this ‘sense’ and allowed myself to expand the rules of existence.

Do you see the world – in general – as a symbiosis of humanity or dependent on self? Are you dependent on anything, artistically speaking?

Neither, or both, plus everything else. Humanity suggests a human-centric understanding of interdependency. I feel dependent on everything, all the spectrums of living and non-living things. I also know that the division between those two categories are not so exacting.

I see that you have this penchant for constant movement in all directions. Where does the affinity for this concept stem from? What is your opinion about those who map out their lifeline up to its finest details (go to college, find a job, earn money, buy a house, have a family, etc.)?

I have never experienced life as something linear. My experience in life moves in all directions, so I know nothing other than that. Being alive is ecstatic and chaotic with so many forces at play. I sometimes imagine it as a hurricane or a tornado whose energy needs humidity, dryness, coolness, and warmth, all happening at the same time.

The energy that I conjure feels like all those factors. They need to happen to create the core force that pulls things into the center.

The idea I am trying to embody might be located at the center – in that stillness in the middle, the eye of the storm – but I may never arrive there. And if I do, it might only be moments before I am thrown back out again into the chaos of the surrounding energies at play.   

You have mentioned that when it comes to your art, you are not interested in judgment and relation. Could you elaborate more on that?

I believe you mean that I am interested in relation. Judgment is arrival, a fixed point, a decision, something definitive. Whereas relation is something that is more wayward and present, something interstitial. For me, that is the intriguing part.

A sense of femininity and feminine prowess is present in your sculptures. The softness and hardness of the edges complement, an overview of Yin and Yang. How do these concepts influence your life as an individual? What other themes do you convey in your sculptures?

With clay, there is a loud and constant negotiation between permanence and impermanence, fragility and strength. There are moments of transformation that happen throughout the process, when earth and water come together, when the air hits the water, and when the fire hits the earth. This flow between states of matter or the shapeshifting of material identities is something I feel connected with.

With my video and animation practice, it swings between dimensions, materializing and dematerializing from 3D to 2D space, back into 3D, sliding into 2D again, and back and forth.So much of my existence resonates with this multi-dimensional translation. When these various modes of existence play out at the same time, and this back-and-forth is engaged, there is an illusory or almost binaural experience where the mind simulates something that is obviously not there in a physical sense.

The characters in my work come from notions of digitally rendered, animated, non-human figures bearing feminine shapes. They are Anime-inspired erotic and aesthetic objects that can traverse existence between the physical (clay) to the digital (dematerialized).

Anime is one of the most visually distinctive, largest exported and consumed contemporary media from East Asia. They embody borderless beings who increase their collective life force through rhizomatic reproduction. They are an amalgamation of bodies, fluid, and overflowing desire and excess.

They are literal and abstracted in their philosophical underpinnings and poetic in their materiality.

Going through your video installations, your works engage the meeting between utopia and dystopia. How do you conceive these realms? Are they based on personal or external experiences?

I would say they are based on both my internal and external experience and perhaps even more so where those distinctions begin to overlap. I do not think of the concepts of dystopia or utopia when I am conceiving of these realms. I think of them more as personal mythology.

That being said, I do like the literal translation of utopia – “no place” – as if it were a space of refusal.

How is your artistic world unfolding these days? Is there anything missing that you want to look for? Also, how would you like your art to influence the world?

There is always something missing, always something I am looking for, always more to uncover, which is why I keep making. I like to keep the carrot on the string and the garden growing within the trampled ground beneath me, you know?