Meet Anida Yoeu Ali

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Anida Yoeu Ali a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Anida Yoeu , thanks so much for taking the time to share your insights and lessons with us today. We’re particularly interested in hearing about how you became such a resilient person. Where do you get your resilience from?

I come from a lineage of resilience since my entire family survived the genocide in Cambodia. Growing up as a displaced Asian, Muslim, Refugee, American Woman here in America, you learn really quickly how to use your resiliency to rise above so much that is thrown at you. I am deeply grateful to my parents for enduring all that they did from the atrocities and brutal violence they witnessed in Cambodia to the violence of racism and poverty here in America.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

I am an interdisciplinary artist whose works span performance, installation, new media, public encounters, and political agitation. My medium is performance-installation and my materials are courage, color and joy. I have an engaged practice utilizing my body, textiles, the immediate environment around me and public participation. I create memorable performance personas and take great risks to present them to a global public both inside and outside of cultural institutions. My performance personas are always heroines and larger than life figures–women who are bold, courageous and unapologetic. My work complicates narratives and pushes forth transnational hybrid identities as radical modes of representation with religious, regional and political significance. Central to many of my performances is my use of fabric, a practice rooted in my Cham-Khmer Muslim refugee experience when my family fled with only the clothes on our backs. Hybridizing religious aesthetics to disrupt ideas around otherness, textiles serve as both a storytelling device and sculptural element that extends my body’s surface and assumed personas into specific time-space intersections. I utilize lengthy meters as skin, as a way for my ‘body’ to extend into public spaces, and as a metaphoric device for stories to spread across an expanse. But those stories aren’t literal or spoken. The stories much like my art happens as encounters between performer and viewer. My work places my body with colors that evoke joy and pleasure – infusions of “fabulousness.” I like being playful and I believe my performances are necessary interventions to reclaim power, occupy public spaces and reimagine a hyper-presence and hyper-visibility for myself and the multiple communities I represent and engage with.

I show all over the world especially between the US and the Asia-Pacific region. This past year, I had two major solos shows running simultaneously, “The Red Chador: Becoming Rogue” at Warin Lab Contemporary in Bangkok and “The Red Chador: Close Encounters” at the Kellogg Art Gallery in Pomona, California. From July 17-20, 2025 I will be presenting “The Red Chador: Becoming Rogue” at the Seattle Art Fair as part of their public projects platform with Warin Lab Contemporary.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

I am passionate, driven, energetic and people-centered. I am somebody who doesn’t take “no” for an answer and will take a lot of initiative to make things happen. I don’t like dealing with gatekeepers and will always find away around them or a different path to achieving what I want. I believe when there are no spaces for you, then you must make those spaces for yourself and for your community. Don’t sit around waiting for things to drop in your lap or for doors to open or for an invitation to a seat at “the table.” Take risks, find your courage and move through the world with integrity and confidence.

All the wisdom you’ve shared today is sincerely appreciated. Before we go, can you tell us about the main challenge you are currently facing?

I want to say it becomes easier as you age but that’s not true. The path of an artist is not at all easy. It is not economically sustainable, and I want to give up so often.

Through it all, I remain persistent, and I’ve accepted that I cannot and will not please everyone. I try not to get too worked up by hateful comments or critics of the work because it’s always easier for people to tear down rather than build up.

I spend a lot of time sketching, researching, actively witnessing, creating visual boards, location scouting and thinking about the political moment in relationship to location or specific sites. Every iteration of a performance takes this into account – which performance work gets enacted in certain spaces.
• What does the moment require of me?
• Do I have joy when making this work or conceiving this persona?
• How do I create a relevant and visually impactful work that can transcend borders and reach a wide range of people without saying a word?
• In what ways does the political moment intersect with my desire to create beautiful aesthetically pleasing (but politically agitative) works?
• How can I take cultural institutions, museums, galleries, contemporary art itself to people— to meet people where they are instead of making people come to the institutions?
• How can I fold regular ol’ folks (everyday people from a range of socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds and ages) into the conversation on contemporary art?
• How can I expose more people to contemporary art and performance who don’t typically go to museums, galleries and theaters?

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