sculpture

At the opening of “The Buddhist Bug” at the Vincent Price Art Museum on Saturday, guests will see a 328-foot-long orange insect. Its body will coil around the museum’s gallery, lobby and atrium, and poke through the walls. The bug’s head, covered in a hijab, will be in one room, and its feet, which some might be tempted to tickle, will be in another.

The creature is occupied and controlled by Anida Yoeu Ali, a Cambodian-born artist who lives in Tacoma, Wash. Ali’s numerous performance-based exhibits explore her Cambodian-American identity and Buddhist and Muslim religions. The bug is her “totally humorous take on hybridity.”

As the bug, Ali doesn’t speak. She mostly stands or kneels and makes facial expressions in reaction to her surroundings and passersby. But she likes to engage with visitors, who can either touch her elaborate garment, talk to her, take pictures of her or simply observe her.

Artist Anida Yoeu Ali’s exhibit, “Anida Yoeu Ali: The Buddhist Bug,” features a 328-foot-long performance installation at the Vincent Price Art Museum in Monterey Park.

(Ariana Drehsler / For The Times)

“I get a lot of people who ask for a photo or they’ll ask for a hug,” says Ali. “There’s so many stories that get whispered into my ear. A lot happens when you can hold someone’s attention with just your eyes. There’s a vulnerability that happens when you make eye-to-eye contact without any words involved.”

Ali likes to use expansive spaces and incorporate fabrics and textiles, whether it’s a red, sequin-covered chador or a tubular-looking worm made out of polyester, Lycra and spandex. Such things make the petite artist feel “taller and larger than life.”

Ali will appear in the suit for only two hours during the show’s first and last days. But for the rest of the exhibit’s run, the museum will display the bug in its entirety, in addition to sculpture, photographs and video that document how Ali has spent the last 15 years becoming her creature alter ego.

Born in Battambang, Ali, 52, is of mixed Malay, Khmer, Thai and Cham ethnicity, and was raised Muslim in a country that’s 96% Buddhist. She and her family left Cambodia in 1979 to escape the genocide committed by the brutal Khmer Rouge regime and settled in Chicago. Ali studied at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the Art Institute of Chicago. She’s currently a senior artist-in-residence at the University of Washington Bothell.

Director of the Vincent Price Art Museum Steven Wong and Executive Director Sonia Mak of Asian Arts Initiative.

(Ariana Drehsler / For The Times)

Ali conceived one of her best-known performance-based works, “The Red Chador,” in 2014 after relocating to Cambodia for a few years. She wanted to address the rise of Islamophobia in the wake of major events happening at the time, including France’s ban on facial coverings (the country had already banned the hijab years prior) and the terrorist attacks on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Ali also wanted to confront the politicization of Muslim women’s dress and contradict the “imagery of Muslim women as joyless and depressed.”

“It was an opportunity to put on a chador, but one of my choosing and one of my designs,” Ali says. “It was to also honor the Muslim women in my background. My mother, grandmother, aunties and cousins all covered and did so joyfully. That was never an issue for them.”

Ali wore the red sequin chador in 15 cities, including at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in 2015, where, during a 12-hour performance, she threatened to chop off 99 baguettes. The installation was meant to challenge Muslim stereotypes while making a subversive nod to the bread as a famous French symbol. “The Red Chador” also made a stop earlier this year at the W. Keith and Janet Kellogg University Art Gallery at Cal Poly Pomona.

“The Buddhist Bug” was created in 2011, a few years before “The Red Chador,” and inspired by the pervasiveness of the saffron-colored robes worn by monks in Cambodia. The piece not only drew on the color orange but was also influenced by a collapsible play tunnel she received as a gift after giving birth to her first child.

A photo titled “Into Dreamland, The Buddhist Bug, 2015,” (photographed by Masahiro Sugano), and featured at the Vincent Price Art Museum as part of the exhibit, “Anida Yoeu Ali: The Buddhist Bug.”

(Ariana Drehsler / For The Times)

Ali wears a hijab while in the suit and uses a second person, usually a model or intern, to provide the bug’s feet — though she insists that those are the “bug’s feet.” It’s a fun, childlike interpretation of the complexities of coming from two cultures and religions.

“I wanted to do something that was tapping into my diasporic identity or what I call the ‘diasporic dilemma,’” says Ali. “This notion of going back and forth and constantly feeling like you’re not enough in one country or one culture. The bug is the result of that. You look at it and it’s a big orange creature. But for me it’s more of a tunnel structure that can double as a bridge, an entity that can connect two points or two locations. That’s the poetic part of the project.”

Sonia Mak, who co-curated the exhibit at VPAM with museum director Steve Wong, invited Ali to show in L.A. after catching one of her performances at the Seattle Asian Art Museum in 2024.

Photographs in the installation — some taken by Ali’s husband, Masahiro Sugano — capture Ali dressed as the bug in cities all over the world. Some are placed on a sculpture resembling the Rub el Hizb, an Islamic star shaped like an octagram. The rest are mounted on the walls and show the bug in places like Battambang and the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, at a restaurant, in a classroom, on a boat and a bridge.

In one image, Ali rides in a bicycle carriage. In others she stands outside a mosque while kids play with the bug’s feet and sits in an abandoned movie theater, her tail wrapped around the seats. (Angelina Jolie, whose adopted son Maddox is from Cambodia, was recently photographed visiting these cinemas and is reportedly renovating the theaters.)

Ali envisions someday performing as the bug in the desert in the Middle East and maybe building a children’s public playground as a “fun manifestation” of the project.

“I come from a country with an awful, violent history,” she says. “I have a unique set of identities and perspectives that aren’t easily explainable, which is why I make art. I want people to think about how weird and strange the bug looks, but I want them to feel happy looking at the orange. I love it when the grotesque and the beautiful sit side by side. It makes for some magical artistic moments.”

At 69, I had never hiked with a backpack and I had no idea what land art was. Nonetheless, when my friend Jackie, a nature documentary film-maker, invited me to join her and her friends Wendy and Sasha on a hiking trip to Refuges d’Art in the mountainous countryside of Haute-Provence, I said a resounding “yes”. We would be sleeping alongside sculptures by the renowned land artist Andy Goldsworthy.

First, I watch Rivers and Tides, a documentary on Goldsworthy’s work, and discover he has built exquisite ice sculptures and stone cairns in my own country, Canada. His work seems to speak to an older part of the soul. Then, I start walking up hills, gradually adding weights to my backpack until I can comfortably carry 9kg (20lb).

We meet in Digne-les-Bains, a bustling mountain town in the centre of the Unesco geopark of Haute-Provence, and the starting point for a 10-day, 150km (93-mile) hiking route that includes the possibility of staying overnight at seven reservable but free off-grid sleeping cabins. Goldsworthy worked alongside local teams to restore the abandoned shepherd huts, farmhouses, chapel and stone shelters, and created a site-specific artwork for each one. Over four days, we will visit three of these refuges and hike about 45km (28 miles).

Our first stop in Digne-les-Bains is Maison Alexandra David-Neél, a museum dedicated to the adventurous, peripatetic life of a woman who, in 1924, disguised herself as a beggar to become the first western woman to enter the Forbidden City of Lhasa in Tibet. The keys to the refuges are kept here, no doubt, to inspire hikers for the adventures that lie ahead.

On the first day, we encounter one of three sentinels that sit like giant mysterious eggs watching over the route. These 2 to 3-metre tall cairns were made by Goldsworthy without mortar or cement and rely on fitting the right shapes and weights of the stones.

Jackie has told us the trail is mostly flat and indeed, we start on even gravel, chatting and laughing, getting used to the weight of our packs. After 5km, she says we should look for a path leading up the hill on our right. She checks her satnav and points to a goat path going straight up the rocks. I panic. My backpack suddenly feels extremely heavy. In desperation, I check further down the road and, to everyone’s relief, find a path marked with white and red horizontal lines signifying a grande randonnée, a trail certified by the French government.

We begin our ascent, pausing to photograph curlicued and wispy plants right out of Dr Seuss, yellow, scarlet and blue wildflowers, an orange moth sitting on purple brush. Spanish broom perfumes the air. We lift our gaze and see multiple valleys and unique geological formations. It’s easy to imagine our ice-age ancestors walking these trails 15,000 years ago and it’s gratifying to be travelling under our own steam, as they did.

We arrive at the first refuge, La Forest, as the sun is setting. The key unlocks the door. Inside, the air is cold. Our eyes adjust to the dark. A table and benches stand in front of us. To the left, a stairway leads to sleeping platforms. To the right, a doorway into a dark, empty room. From its depths glows a cylindrical obelisk, light falling on one large stone where someone could sit. It’s concave, constructed of light grey stone ending in a porthole to the sky. It’s illuminated by natural light and changes with the time, the weather, the season. This art is living and feels sacred.

That evening, we eat freeze-dried mushroom risotto in the flickering candlelight, play cards, eat chocolate, laugh and share stories. Sasha, who works in film in Germany, teaches us two words: der salzlose – someone who is bland and without flavour; and extrawurst – someone who always demands more. Neither apply to our group. The camaraderie and conviviality bring pure pleasure.

We climb the stairs to the sleeping platforms. Wendy and Sasha have brought sturdy sleeping mats on Jackie’s recommendation. We lay them out and say goodnight. The quiet is complete. Then, a tidal wave of sound erupts. Wendy and Sasha have rolled over. The friction on the technical fabric of their sleeping mats is deafening. The price of comfort has been revealed; they must lie like mummies.

The next day, we descend, picnic by a river on crackers, avocados and cheese, then start climbing again. Sasha and I subversively agree that it’s psychologically better to be told something is going to be hard and then it turns out easier. I console myself that climbing with a backpack is good for bone density and way less boring than lifting weights.

The next refuge, Le Vieil Esclangon, is in a mountain-top meadow. A majestic fan of lifted rock shines across the wide valley. Everywhere we turn there are more mountains and valleys. The first floor of the refuge is a large dark room split in two by a massive fireplace. Upstairs, the sleeping platforms look out on to a sunlit verge. Across from the fireplace, a tall serpentine shape made of dried mud loops back and forth like a meandering river, ending at the top in the source.

The wind picks up and the temperature drops. We gather wood and light a fire. In the flickering orange light, the sculpture comes to life, looking like one of Plato’s eternal forms. We eat our freeze-dried pad thai, the art and the hikers transient and temporary but together in this warm and cosy moment.

Later, we sleep to the sound of wind and rain, woken only by a mouse rave in the middle of the night.

We arrive at the third refuge, La Ferme Belon, in time for a late lunch. In the basement, huge interlinked semicircular stone arches look like a dragon’s body swimming through earth. Upstairs, the sleeping platforms are lovely except for one small detail. A colony of bats hang above. I can feign nonchalance because I know Wendy, who is quietly uber-capable, will find us a delightful B&B for the night. Over pizza and cold rosé, Sasha and I confess to Jackie that we would have rather known how challenging the hikes were going to be. “But you wouldn’t have come if I’d told you,” she answers with a twinkle in her eye.

Andy Goldsworthy said: “To me there is a tremendous difference between works of art that we observe in a museum just for a few minutes and works of art in which we live for a short while, in which we sleep. To sleep in a sculpture is a wonderful idea.”

In Digne-les-Bains we return the keys and soak our stronger bodies in the town’s hot springs. We’ve already said yes to Jackie’s next adventure, sight unseen.

Claudia Casper’s novel The Mercy Journals won the Philip K Dick award for distinguished science fiction in 2017 (Arsenal Pulp Press)