PRESS COVERAGE

YunnyBunny in Wall Street Journal!

--Schuker, Lauren A.E., Wall Street Journal,
"The Art World's Biggest Party", Dec. 1,2007, Pg. W4.

Yun Bai in New American Paintings, #67 2006 Pacific Coast Edition Dec. 2006, www.newamericanpaintings.com

"You want to be a Feminist Artist?" .

..In contrast, Bai argued that younger women needed to confront the stereotype of the "monster that society has branded feminists to be." You become a feminist when you stand up for yourself, and for other women. You become a feminist when you defend your daughter's rights, her choices, and well-being. You become a feminist when you give a stranger in the bathroom your spare tampon. So by claiming "I am not a feminist, but..." women are saying "I believe in women's rights and practice it, but I don't want to admit to it because I am afraid of what ignorance will brand me to be.

--Helena Reckitt, RatSalad DeLuxe: Feminists and Other Animals, Apr.2006,
Issue 8, www.ratsaladeluxe.com/ratsaladsite/reckitt.htm

"Broken Blossoms"

It was amusing to watch gallery-goers contemplate Yun Bai's exhibition Fresh Flora on a recent Saturday afternoon. Men and women would mosey into Castleberry Hill's Wertz Contemporary gallery, chatting merrily. Then they would promptly about-face when they realized what was going on in Bai's abstract botanicals. From across the room, the content of the mixed-media paintings seems innocuous enough. Against pale pastel backgrounds of robin's egg blue and conch-shell pink, graphic tendrils suggesting trees and ivy support clusters of flesh-colored blossoms. The strange trees meld a stark Asian feel with a hip, West Coast graphic attitude, testifying to former Atlanta-based artist Bai's Chinese heritage and current Los Angeles residency. But move in closer and what appear to be blossoms or fruit-laden branches are in fact details cut from glossy porn magazines and assembled into a sucky-fucky collage of breasts, vaginas, penises, tongues and lips. It would appear from the skittish reaction of those art-goers that maybe Americans aren't as sex-obsessed as the booming Internet porn business and these magazines would have us believe. Most seemed downright spooked by Bai's work, which offers powerful commentary on the detachment and alienation contained in porn's bacchanalian extremes. To really see Bai's work, you need to practically bury your nose in it. A closer inspection reveals that Bai has added sentences to her canvases, which curl like grape tendrils around the naked body parts. In those lines, Bai has encapsulated her own desires, which range from Playboy centerfold ambitions like "What I want: Live by a clean beach," to the more esoteric wish list of a young artist: "Get into New American Paintings," "Get into Whitney Biennial." The voraciousness of those mouths and orifices is nothing compared to the bottomless want of a struggling artist. In her previous work, Bai used porn at the service of feminist commentary. But Bai's latest exhibition shows her ability to inject new content and complexity.

-- Felicia Feaster, Creative Loafing, Mar. 15, 2006, atlanta.creativeloafing.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A36093

"Artist makes faux Chinese lacquer scenes from porn mags" Chinese-American artist Yun Bai makes "porn flower" collages from adult magazine snippets. She laquers them together to create trompe l'oeil scenes that look like traditional mother-of-pearl tableaus at a distance. Up close, however, you can see the dirty bits.

--Boingboing.net, Jan. 30, 2006, www.boingboing.net/2006/01/29/artist-makes-faux-ch.html

"10 Emerging Artists"

1. Yun Bai
2. Lecia Dole-Recio
3. Amir Fallah
4. Renee Lotenero
5. Ian Patrick
6. Antonio Adriano Puleo
7. Analia Saban
8. Holly Topping
9. Robert Wechsler
10.Joe Goode

--Peter Frank, "Zeitlist, 10 Emerging Artists", LA Weekly, Pg. 54, Vol.28, No. 7, Jan. 6-12, 2006, www.laweekly.com/news/lists/10-emerging-artists/13342/

"Yun Bai's floating cellnoid cluster reflect personal inquiries and experiences."
--Diana McClintock, ART PAPERS Magazine, Pg. 53, Jan/Feb. 2006

Lisa Cheng, art review, World Journal, Sept. 2005.

"Science fiction looms large, too, in Yun Bai's ping-pong-ball creature that looks more like a model of molecular structure."
--Jerry Cullum, Atlanta Journal Constitution, Sept. 25, 2005

"Transatlantic is an exhibition of 10 emerging artists from Atlanta, Georgia"
--Absolute Arts (www.absolutearts.com), Jun 2004.

Franklin Sirmans, "Projects in the Making", Pg. 96, Art Asia Pacific, Spring 2004

"Paradise still Lost"

"Work that toys with sexual conventions succeeds where so much in this show fails. Such is the case with Yun Bai's 'Porn Flower' collages of skin magazines formed into botanicals--previously shown at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center. Also on display is the artist's more recent work, oddly lurical, troubling close-ups of nipples coupled with sexual confessions from their owners.... The notion of Eden was sullied long ago. But works like Bai, Wallace and Witherspoon's suggests that ewvery day we go a little further in our human obsession with wanting to know more, wanting to see more--at our own expense."

--Felicia Feaster, review, Creative Loafing Atlanta, Jan 1, 2004, atlanta.creativeloafing.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A14490

"Prurient Pieces of Art"

"Yun Bai's floral arrangements are composites of erotically charged representations of nude women borrowed from pornographic magazines. The cut-up images have a glossy, exploitative, distancing tinge that characterizes the sexist appetite of such media. Sleazy sayings encircle the posed X-rated posies, further advertising lascivious, saleable sex. Bai's collages seem simultaneously pornographic and an argument against pornography, satisfying viewer's voyeurism while turning it back against itself."

-Alice Winn, review, Pittsburgh Pulp, Dec. 11, 2003

"Losing its Luster"

"Images certainly aren’t what they seem to be in Yun Bai’s acrylic-on-Masonite works. At first, she seems to have painted dainty flowers onto the black, shiny surface -- like the floral decorations of a Japanese print you might find at Target, perfect for the wall space above a living-room couch. But take a closer look: The plants are collages culled from pornographic magazines, close-ups that actually do look more like stamens than genitalia until you read the fine print that seems to have been copied from those same magazines."

--Sharmila Venkatasubban, review, Pittsburgh City Paper, Dec. 11, 2003

"Art Review: At Fe Gallery, lust makes attractive exhibit"

"There's nothing subtle about the strong and evocative works by Catya Plate, Yun Bai and Neil Bender, althought it takes a moment to see past their formal prettiness. What appear to be refined, floral patterened lacquer works are actually part of Bai's 'Porn Flowers' series comprising images cut from sex magazines, purportedly to challenge sexism but perhaps giving it presence instead.

--Mary Thomas, review, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Dec. 6, 2003, www.post-gazette.com/ae/20031206thomas1206fnp4.asp

"Art Review: Sweet Dreams"

Yun Bai presents creepy little rein-encased bouquets of pink floweres made of clipped-out genitalia and breasts from porn mags embellished with crudely lettered boscenities such as 'dirty old slags live'. -- Ann Klefstad, review , mnartists.org, Oct. 24, 2003 "Sex in many guises, and more" "Bai, a recent graduate of Agnes Scott College, comes on strong with collages that could be subtitled 'les fleurs du mal'. What appear to be elegant, stylized, Asian-inspired blossoms on black or cream lacquered backgrounds turn out to be collages of female private parts taken from pornographic magazines. Around their edges, Bai inscribes porno-promises that infest e-mail in-boxes.

-- Catherine Fox, review, Atlanta Journal Constitution, Jun. 29, 2003

"SEX, LIES AND VIDEOTAPE: Five artists explore sex, identity and myth at the Contemporary"

"Bored with the teenage nymphos on the internet? The Atlanta Contemporary Art Center offers two frisky shows that trymp such unimaginative bawdiness. An Internet-age obsessiveness--some sexual some not--looms large in the artwork on display. The Contemporary's exhibitions, 'Summer Solos: James Barsness, David Isenhour, Jeff Sonhouse' and 'Secrets and Lies: work from Yun Bai and Ohm Phanphiroj', make sex, mutation and transgression their common currency. In her 'Porn Flower' series, Yun Bai has cut out the naughty bits of graphic porn magazines and rearranged them into flowers set against a beguiling, glossy surface that initially lures you in. But like a Venus flytrap promising beauty and delivering entrapment, Bai's dirty decoupage delivers a shock by crafting its natural beauty out of breasts, labia, come-hither eyes, talon fingernails and linked legs. Her sexual Frankensteins imply a feminist critique of women reduced to body parts. Artist Ohm Phanphiroj's video, the voice of the filmmaker can be heard encouraging the dark-haired young man being photographed to offer up intimate details of his personal life and sexual interests. All the while Phanphiroj hints that he would like to help the reluctant Frank let go of his heterosexual 'hang-up'. this disturbing exchange illustrates how faux-concern and compassionate converssation can mask a single-minded pursuit of sex. An equally intersting idea that emerges from the video is how easily people like Frank give up the intimate secrets of their lives sand how they can be cajoled into dramatic shifts of identity. That interest in how identity can be cast off or put on like an article of clothing is also explored in Jeff Sonhouse's paintings of men wearing a variety of personality-obscuring masks. Bai and Phanphiroj are seemingly grouped together because they're both emerging Asian artists, but there are far more interesting connections between Bai's work and that of James Barsness. Installed in separate wings of the Contemporary, James Barsness' and Yun Bai's artworks provide a provocative call and response. While Bai's work is invested in the mass media proliferation of girlie mags, Athens-based artist James Barsness takes a broader, ancient approach to sex in artworks that often feature outrageous couplings to match Yun Bai's flesh fair. Barsness' fastidiously detailed drawings executed on carpet-sized pieces of linen and canvas reference a vast range of ancient eastern religious art. But Barsnes is clearly not the sort to make highbrow/lowbrown distinctions. Mixed in with those references are allusions to 19th century Japanese prints, freak show banners, tattoo art, comic books and the scatological vision of Crumb. Spirit and matter collide forcefully in Barsness' work, which shows sexual coupling as a hallucinogenic Hieronymous Bosch nightmare. In the unilaterally rude and deeply cynical 'Abridged History of the Civilized World', Barsness reduces culture and creation to a momen'ts spasm between scenes of flatulence, copulation and war. While Bai's work feels conrolled and purposeful, Barsness' supersized doodles--in which each square inch is filled with drawings and appropriated cartoons, photos, porn, and decoration--suggests the obsessive, roamingmutating subconscious. There are other obsessive ripples spun off from the defining madness of Bai and Barsness. david Isenhour continues his inbestigation of cartoon actions in his morphing, glistening sculptural crafted from wood or fiberglass and coated with auto body paint. Isenhour echoes some of Barsness' fascination with comic icons, mutation, transformation and fluid action. But where Barsness' work is invested in the comic book's psychological frenzy, Isenhour is interested in the clean, minimalist vocabulary of comic book action: the Pow! Bing! Zowee! repretoire of physical possibility. For Isenhour, comics are the mythology of a society defined culture. In humorous expression of that idea, Isenhour takes the ancient "Ourobouros" cyclical, eternal dimension and makes it into one of his typically glossy, cartoon style sculptures--a cartoon gesture that could be eternity or Wile E. Coyote chasing his own tail reference to the Ourobourtos myth is especially humorous juxtapozed with lowbrown pieces 'Stink' whose humoursly foul puke waves show the artist's sense of irreverence. Like Barsness, Isenhour delightfully reconstitutes myth--both the ancient and the Pop. That Isenhour can say so much with such pared-down gestures makes it an even more interesting comparision with the excessive, baroque, inverse of Barsness' example.

--Felicia Feaster, review, Creative Loafing Atlanta, Jun. 26, 2003

"FLOWER OF MY SECRET"

The Bai house, apart from its neglected lawn flocked with winter weeds, is indistinguishable from the other Edward Scissorhands boxes curving around an endless street in a Lawrenceville subdivision. The red Chevrolet parked outside, decorated with "Girls Kick Ass" and "Freak" bumper stickers, gives little indication of the culture clash of Old World meets Brave New One going on in this nondescript one-story house. Inside, a traditional Chinese couple, Nai-Zhi Bai and his wife Ruo-Qun Gu, lead a visitor past the grand piano that dominates their snug living room. There, on the glossy wood surface, stand three large framed "flower" collages. From a distance they look like curving botanical forms on lacquered black backgrounds. It's only on closer inspection that one can make out that the leaves and petals are comprised of tiny vulvas and spread vaginas, breasts and anuses culled from magazines like Oriental Slut Parade, Asian Babes, Orient Eighteen and Black Lust. The "Porn Flowers" commanding center stage are made by the couple's 23-year-old daughter Yun Bai, a 2001 Agnes Scott graduate, whose artwork is crafted from the disreputable dregs of hardcore porn. Cans of lacquer, wood and porn fill every inch of the cramped living room, which doubles as Yun's studio. The taunting, saucy "Porn Flowers," with their wrinkled, brown and pink vulvas, provide a lewd display in the otherwise well-behaved domestic tableaux in which Yun's mother serves a pale yellow jasmine tea. Beyond the nipple clamps and spread legs of the "Porn Flowers" are other bodies of artwork -- paintings of pastel flowers and elegant framed calligraphy created by Mr. Bai and Yun's grandmother -- which recede into the background. Even Mr. Bai's lovely, bountiful still life painting of flowers crowded into the narrow hallway is upstaged by its wall-mate, a self-portrait of Yun as a fierce, goth teen. In what soon becomes a familiar pattern of adulation, Mr. Bai expresses deep pride that his daughter created this petulant, glaring self when she was only 14. Despite the impossible-to-avoid-spectacle of all those body parts, there is something oddly shared in Mr. Bai's ethereal flower paintings and his daughter's porn posies, both of which represent romantic, natural forms in strikingly different but also strangely similar ways. It is one of the many bizarre contradictions of the Bai home that it is the soft-spoken patriarch who paints flowers on a row of white porcelain plates hanging on one wall and the daughter who is the obsessive porn junkie, hunched with scissors over her worn copies of Nugget and Sensual Special Contact. Yun is a feisty representative of new-millennial, cross-cultural womanhood, like a hybrid of an outspoken Courtney Love and the quiet, bowed-head Asian good girl many of us knew in school. "I am so humble" is a constant refrain of Yun's, delivered with a breathless self-awareness. But the words are like a reflex reinforcement of an Asian humility that isn't necessarily visible in Yun's confident, riot grrrl demeanor. When speaking about her "Porn Flowers" project, she is just as likely to indignantly spit, "There's a big difference between talking dirty and offensive shit." The midday sun streams into the Bais' living room as Yun spreads another of her art projects, "Nipple Secret," on the coffee table as her parents sip tea and lean back into one of the four couches squeezed into their already franticly cluttered living room. The photographic self-portraits of her friends' nipples sprinkled with glitter or painted a fire-engine red were made, Yun says, "to be playful" and to provide a "positive contrast to the 'Porn Flowers.'" "It really shows women and women's experiences." Her parents are respectfully silent, watching their daughter explain these portraits of her friends' nipples. Yun is just as quiet and intent when her parents shift the conversation to their difficult road from China to America. "In America, you have more freedom. You can choose your career by yourself," says Mr. Bai, who clearly views that freedom in terms of how his only daughter might profit from it. "If she like to become an artist, I say OK. But she know also, art is very hard. In beginning, not easy to make money. Some very famous artists after they die are famous. ... Maybe after 10 years, she very famous in the world, who know that?" The Bais were teenage sweethearts who, Yun says, were "kind of brainwashed" by the Communist Revolution. They had Yun in 1979 in China's capital, Beijing. Unable to choose their professions or even live in the same city, the newlyweds saw the prospect of a better life when Mr. Bai was granted permission by the Chinese government to study for a master's degree in physics at the University of Utah, where he was later joined by his wife and 5-year-old daughter. The family then moved to Tallahassee where Mr. Bai received another master's degree in chemical engineering at Florida State. Meanwhile his wife, a pediatrician in China, worked as a waitress. When Yun left Florida to attend Agnes Scott, her parents eventually followed for better job prospects and the chance to be closer to their daughter in Atlanta. Both wound up selling cars at a Chamblee Toyota dealership and became U.S. citizens this past year. But life in America has not been easy for her parents, or for Yun. As a teenager she often clashed with her parents, who she felt placed impossible demands on her. "I went through severe depression," says Yun. "I was in counseling. I was screaming at my mother. I had low confidence, I was suicidal, I was on medication. I was really depressed from like 10 to 17." Part of the problem, and a theme underlying almost every conflict between Yun and her parents, was an essential feature of their cultural heritage -- the one family/one child policy that was a harsh reality of life when Yun was born. Though China's one-child laws were officially instituted in 1980, Yun's mother says that as early as 1975 the stricture was in place "all over the country in the cities and the villages." The one-child laws were instituted to limit the wildfire Chinese population growth, which led many families to infanticide or selective abortion to make sure their one child would be male. Yun's growing recognition that her gender made her the less desirable kind of child perhaps intensified her restlessness. "My dad used to joke about it --'You're lucky we kept you' -- when I was a little kid," remembers Yun. "And it hurt, but I was like, OK, they love me, whatever. But you can see how that really forms me." Because childbirth was so strictly curtailed, Chinese parents sometimes invest the hope of two, three, even four children into one, resulting in enormous expectations. Yun's mother places a pile of bulging photo albums on the coffee table: There's Yun as a plump, healthy Beijing baby; Yun at a Tallahassee spelling bee; Yun in her synchronized swimming outfit; Yun as a toddler dressed as a doctor examining one of her dolls; Yun -- her tiny forehead level with the keys -- playing the piano. "In China, one family/one child, so a lot of hope," her mother offers. "The parents don't know what they should learn ..." she says, explaining the photos of their daughter in various extracurricular poses of what Yun calls "that Asian filial piety." "At one time I was doing jazz, tap, ballet, Chinese school on Saturday, piano and swimming!" Yun confesses with an amused disbelief. Her father begins to laugh, "It's true." "And that's a lot for a little kid," stresses Yun. Talented in many realms, Yun showed a special gift for the piano. When the family settled in Tallahassee in 1985, she received instruction from a Juilliard professor, but she eventually stopped playing. "This makes me worried and sad," her mother laments. "I thought maybe I pushed too much. With art I never push her. "Yun is sitting in a dark corner of Cafe Intermezzo talking about how that whirl of influences -- demanding immigrant parents, a sense of guilt and anger at her second-class gender, her desire to carve her own path -- led to a crucial crossroads that made her "Porn Flowers" possible. Despite a crushing sense of obligation and her mother's insistence that she study business, Yun knew she had to follow her own dream. At Agnes Scott her financial aid debts mounted, but she plugged away, taking on more and more internships and work-study jobs, falling asleep in class so often she thought she might have narcolepsy. During her senior year, the enormity of life came crashing in. In the span of one disastrous year, her mother was diagnosed with cancer, she broke up with her boyfriend of two years and she watched her financial aid debt grow and grow. Yun couldn't imagine how she would ever be able to take care of her sick mother if that day ever came, or help cushion her parents' retirement years. Her decision to switch from a business major to a painting major at Agnes Scott also made the prospect of one day supporting her parents with her work seem nearly impossible. "That's when I discovered about women and desperation," Yun confides of a decision that went against every fiber of her obedient daughter's training. "I was like, what can I do about this money thing? What can I do to make money legally? So I just did some things that I wasn't supposed to do. ..." Without money and hopelessly in debt, this devoted daughter began working as a dancer in Atlanta's thriving adult entertainment industry. That time spent on the dark side of life changed her perceptions forever. "I was so naive and innocent until I discovered this world," she sighs. Yun incorporated her new secret profession into her rigorous, goal-oriented lifestyle and began working 60 hours a week on top of going to school full time for eight months. "I worked from 7 at night until 4 in the morning four days a week and then did work study and then did an internship, got about three or four hours of sleep." But it was more than just the long hours that took a toll on Yun. "After coming home from work at 4 a.m., being called a whore, I would take a shower, bawling and crying in the shower, and that's when I vowed that I wouldn't let myself fail as an artist. I'd be damned if I did. The anger and hurt drove me to succeed, complete and finish." What most surprised Yun about her work as a stripper was the camaraderie she shared with the other dancers. "The girls were sweet," remembers Yun. "They were very supportive of each other." But it was the men, she says, who affected her the most. "Previously, I thought of men as these sweet boys," Yun says. "And then I saw them as uncontrollable sexual beasts. They could not keep their dicks in their pants. If you got them alone, they would try to buy you off, and if you refused, they would call you a whore. It just completely changed me. It was crazy." Unlike some Asian Hardcore where a good girl plunges into the sex industry and never returns, Yun not only made it out on the other side, a little less innocent, a lot wiser, she found a profitable new awareness that fed directly into her artwork. Inspired by her growing intimacy with fellow students at the Atlanta College of Art, which encourages a conceptual approach to art, Yun began applying what she gleaned from her experience in strip clubs to her artwork. Soon she was putting aside the watercolors and abstract paintings she was doing at Agnes Scott and began developing highly conceptual, feminist work. Suddenly, Yun saw a harmonious convergence, where the essential valuelessness of being female in a Chinese gender economy collided with a revelation Yun discovered working as a stripper: that men in America can also see women as valueless. "The background of my experiences is completely relevant to the work. It was weird because I saw it as research. I wrote everything down as documentation because I knew that my experience there was going to lead me to make art about it," she says. "I want people to understand that women are flowers, whether they're in the sex industry or not. Life is about perspective." While the sensuous, lovely floral facade of the "Porn Flowers" speaks to the reverence Yun feels for women and their sexuality, the close-up images and caustic language sampled from porn tramples such loveliness in smut and loathing. Curving around the leaves and petals of her "Porn Flowers" are words sampled from that industry's unimaginative lexicon. Phrases like "It's a Man's Heaven," "Forced to Suck," "Asian Whore," and "Wife Hunting in the Orient" turn the delicacy of the flowers on their head and give the work yet another edgy jolt. "The way that I've cut up the porn is a mockery of objectification itself," exclaims Yun. Yun's other current project is a series of photographs of her friends she calls "The Nipple Secret Project," which juxtapose close-up photos of a Rainbow Coalition of aureoles with "secrets" these women confided in Yun, encompassing everything from rape and masturbation to first orgasms and strange encounters with the family pet. The "Porn Flowers" and "Nipple Secret Project" are oddly complementary endeavors, the first using porn to examine how women have been falsely represented in the sex industry, the second using the voices and bodies of real women to talk about the true complexity of their sexual identity. Both projects have already ignited some interest on the Atlanta arts scene. The Atlanta Contemporary Art Center will spotlight Yun's "Porn Flowers" in an exhibition this summer called Secrets and Lies. The Contemporary's curator Helena Reckitt, who selected the "Porn Flowers" for the two-person show, remembers being flabbergasted by the work and by the extreme circumstances of Yun's domestic arrangement. "By the end of the day my head was bursting!" recalls Reckitt of her first foray into Yun's Lawrenceville digs. "I thought it was so cool and so hybrid and contemporary, it just really blew this whole cliched idea that I had. It made me realize here is a thoroughly contemporary feminist Chinese-American living this real in-between existence." Yun's parents came to America to give their daughter choices where they had been given none. And Yun has exercised the privilege of her new country. She has chosen. What Yun has chosen is the life of an artist and work that confronts not only her new country's ugly stereotypes of Asian female sexuality, but also creates a challenge to her birth country's insistence on overvaluing male children. While the one-child policy isn't an overt issue in any of Yun's work, it is a covert one. It is undeniable that what Reckitt calls Yun's "hybrid" culture -- both her Chinese and American sides -- have imprinted her work. When Yun is not in the presence of her parents, all of her art world dreams seem to center on New York. But Yun's parents want her to return to China, to connect to her heritage and to study at Peking University's prestigious art school. In their company, she expresses excitement about returning to China and the possibility of one day meeting some of the conceptual Chinese artists currently so hot on the international art scene. "The plan this week is that I will wait until my show at the Contemporary is done and then in August go back for a year. I want to just reclaim myself and travel a little bit. "I have a 20-year plan. I would like to be represented by a gallery in five major cities. I don't care if my parents live with me for the rest of my life." While her parents worry about her, she worries about them. "I don't want them to hurt, I don't want them to go through heartbreak because of me. I want to be their good little girl, their little daughter."

--Felicia Feaster, "Flower of my Secret", feature story, Creative Loafing Atlanta, Mar. 5, 2003,

"Fresh" "Bai's cheerfully hyperactive 'Eruption Spill' (2002) can brighten a mood as well a room. Its vibrant reds and yellows slither about the canvas, curling around the more static, plump shapes relaxing in the background"

-- John Nail, review, ART PAPERS Magazine, Sept. / Oct. 2002