Priscilla Kar Yee Lo: Aiming to Please
Welcome back to Alice in Wonderland…
Except Chinese style and made of glass Hello Kitty, our cutesy cat cartoon disguised as a little girl in obeisance. A nod-forgive the pun-deeply bowing to the existing patriarchal pecking order that created and still controls her.
Priscilla Kar Yee Lo understands the fairy tale nature of this material that she uses as her primary medium. Glass, though see-through, can also distort our view, bending realities from its manipulated shape. Her sculptures and installations then quote a fantasy world made for younger versions of herself to consume. Which she readily, if not cynically buys into. But instead of soft and cuddly, her glass figurines and crafted objects are both hard and breakable. What appears to be innocent and kawaii is paradoxically dangerous and perverse. Or the very embodiment of the Kewpie Doll/Dragon Lady stereotype. Aiming to reclaim her agency, Lo accessorizes and weaponizes these toys for little girls to comment on the mediated state of Asian female representation, identity and eroticization.
So through this looking glass, the artist herself becomes the proverbial protagonist falling down the rabbit hole. And where she lands now is the World of Suzie Wong.