You may notice that this newsletter looks a bit different from previous ones. It’s because I’ve moved to Substack (and to Vietnam!), and you are invited along for the ride. As a reminder:
Hi, I’m Kimberly Ye!
I’m an artist, writer, parent, semi-retired sex worker, and millennial muscle mommy of 2 who made ProMomme: A Sex Worker’s Guide to Parenting. Recently, I moved my whole family from Los Angeles to Saigon, and now I’m figuring out how to make (and how to be!) in a new place. I’m calling this newsletter Ladyscumbag, and it’s a record of my Saigon Art + Life Residency.
Traditionally, I’ve used my body and personal archives to create work that interrogates gender, power, labor, and taboo in popular culture. In astro-speak, my work is about 8th House stuff—sex, death, inheritances, and how things get passed between bodies and generations. In addition to my art & essays, I’ll use this space to announce upcoming exhibitions, publications, and opportunities for connection.
I once made a course called “Private Matters, Public Spaces,” where I taught performance to MFA & BFA students that brought private experiences into the public gaze. That class played with ways to give form to the ephemeral, bodily experiences, interpersonal relationships, and processes of maintenance and entropy. This publication is an extension of that work on how our private lives, inner worlds, and secret fears/desires are inherently entangled with public spaces, institutions, and traditions.
Ladyscumbag takes a sensually forensic approach to the airing of dirty laundry—touching, sniffing, and licking their stains to trace contours and origins. The trivial, cringy, filthy, juicy topics associated often with queers & women are serious business here. Some topics of interest include erotic labor, parenthood, plastic surgery, techno-sexual fantasy, homemaking, beauty treatments, personal finance, art making, and bodybuilding. These varied topics are drawn from my own desires and lived experiences, and create a personal entry point into current topics and cultural phenomena.
As a term, “Ladyscumbag” (LSB) was born from my most prolific era of partying, circa 2014, when my friends and I would strap all our belongings to our bodies before going out lest we lose our shit while losing our shit. This was a time of warehouse parties, Burning Man, and research drugs—when online dating and Instagram were still in their infancy, and poor decisions were made in real time IRL. For us, LSB represented the parts of our millennial selves that developed, ran rampant, and enlivened this carnivalesque scene.
Our desires to consume (beers, shots, molly, tacos, anything really–if we could get it for free) were expressed through a feminine filter, even if it was an unruly one. The LSB in us helped us charm our way into the backrooms of parties, cut in line, procure free drinks, cigarettes, rides, and places to stay. It gave us access and permission to grab what we wanted and be despicable. It was fun and sketchy and shameless.
The LSB figure fueled my sex worker hustle, got me sued, and also got me a husband and house. But the year after having my first kid, I found myself side-eyeing this archetype that largely shaped the “adult” I am today. This first kid, my son, was a vulnerable baby born by emergency c-section who had to be sustained by inpatient oxygen for the first 10 days of life. Looking back now, I wonder if my disavowal of LSB was due to a subconscious bargain with the universe I was negotiating due to how fragile I percei ved this boy to be. If he can’t even withstand regular air, how would he fare in a world unapologetically manipulated by LSB’s?
As I grew distant from my inner LSB in early matrescence, I embarked upon the process of becoming a mother, which was a total apocalypse in terms of my previous lifestyle, body, hormone levels, and social identity. American attitudes towards motherhood are confusing, to say the least. Moms are simultaneously fetishized as “saints”, ignored as background extras, scrutinized as potentially negligent domestic laborers, and expected like livestock to bear the brunt of maintaining (or expanding) a homestead. This was a period of heavy social disciplining, and felt similar to how adolescence oriented me to the thrills and perils of womanhood–but less fun and more exhausting.
But as matrescence progressed, I came to understand that the Ladyscumbag archetype is still as relevant as ever to my version of motherhood. This is a lot of what I see myself unpacking as I write this publication. After all, LSB was a concept so generative that I was compelled to raise thousands of dollars and make not just one, but two, gallery exhibitions about it.
During that time, I engaged over 40 artists, creatives, writers, and filmmakers to make creative work inspired by the LSB archetype. I built an entire website to disseminate the work and then turned the digital space into a physical one in a gallery exhibition, which I then had my students document and critique. I was inhabited by LSB then, and turns out, I still am now.
My second child, though, is a girl. My daughter, unlike her brother, squeezed herself steadily out my vagina in 20 minutes, with her hand held next to her face in a cute little K-pop pose the whole time. We went home from the hospital, hardly 48 hours after she arrived in this world, and she has been crushing life ever since. Unphased by her sibling’s much larger stature, she fights back, runs at me full speed, and slaps much harder than you think is possible for a two-year-old. She bursts with vigor, and I see in her the mischievous, innocent essence at the core of the Ladyscumbag. Not malicious, but simply ignorant of the fact that she should feel shame for who she is, what she wants, or for her overflow of spirit. Too much is how much I want!
This appetite is what Ladyscumbag pays homage to. In a world of GLP-1’s, of stuffing ourselves into tight skins and phone screens, LSB forces the world to open up, to stretch out. The reason she reads destructively is that the world is simply too small, too contracted for her big bang energy. But what if the world could expand to fit her? Then she would read Creator, Goddess, Majesty…
This substack is a return to the Ladyscumbag, a conniving, convincing, camouflaged entity that does not try to “cure” her toxicity. Rather, she rides that radioactive wave right into rooms she may have never otherwise entered in this absurd, upside-down world. Most of my twice-monthly posts will be free and public, but some more explicit personal essays on sex work and eroticism will be available to paid subscribers only. Consider becoming one below to access these posts, and to support this work that only I can do.
My work is difficult to categorize, but here are some institutions that believe in it:
Recently, I have been a Franklin Furnace Fund awardee, a Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and a California Arts Council Creative Corps Fellow. My prior work has been funded by the California Arts Council (USA), The National Endowment for the Arts (USA), Foundation for Contemporary Art (USA), Mellon Foundation (USA), and The Australia Council for the Arts (Australia).
My art has been featured nationally and internationally at institutions such as The Getty, MOCA, Guggenheim Gallery, Wattis Institute, Hammer Museum, Banff Center for Arts, Material Art Fair, and Frieze Film Seoul, among others. My MFA is from UCLA, I’ve worked professionally as a dominatrix since 2011, and I’ve been Co-Director of Sex Workers Outreach Project Los Angeles (SWOPLA) since 2019.
I’ve held faculty positions at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) and Pomona College, and my work has been published by Working Girls Press, Petit Mort, The Journal of Lesbian Studies, and The Theater Journal, among others.
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