Ye — the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, and ex-husband of Kim Kardashian — has been on my mind these past few months. When his permanent titanium veneers, costing a whopping $850,000, made headlines earlier this year, my brain went numb, as if it had neither room for disappointment nor reproach, much less amusement. There was simply nothingness, except perhaps a small sense of relief that his new hysterical act was something mildly innocuous — a reprieve from his toxic and blatantly unhinged antisemitism. In Harmony Holiday’s essay “Ask Me About God: On Ye West”, first published online in the Paris Review in 2023, the artist and poet writes that Ye’s “transactional shaming and rehabilitation” is “as close as he can get to intimacy with his public, enacted upon him and then, with himself as accomplice, upon his fans and fanatics.” The nature of contemporary celebrity, the investments made into and the operations of the mass image, and the ever-evolving relationship between audience and artist, are all themes addressed by a trio of innovative shows by emerging artists at the Aspen Art Museum in the coming months.
For Chinese artist Shuang Li — whose first institutional solo exhibition opened at the Swiss Institute in New York in May and travels to Aspen this year — fandom has an uncanny ability to reveal a person’s basest and truest self, while also bringing that person closer to community and perhaps even love. Steeped in internet culture, Li is fixated specifically on the fandom of
American pop-punk band My Chemical Romance. Growing up in Wu City in southeast China, Li initially listened to the band’s music to learn English, but her love for My Chemical Romance has grown into something deeper, and more true. In the exhibition’s titular video, I’m Not (2024) — which is itself broadcast on a makeshift set of bleachers covered in fabric and resin sheets — Li presents an acapella group, led by a young girl, who recites a Chinese version (written by Li) of the eponymous song by My Chemical Romance. The film — a saccharine ode to the band and its influence on the artist’s life — is hard to parse through the matrix of detritus and screens that make up the installation. As Legacy Russell makes clear in her manifesto Glitch Feminism (2021), real life can find itself in digital skins, leaving the acronym IRL dreadfully obsolete — AFK (Away From the Keyboard) taking its rightful place. I’m Not offers an insular, oneiric vision of Li’s doting obsession, while at the same time Li embodies the role of celebrity, flattening the dichotomy between that of the entertainer and the entertained.
When the German-Korean artist Heji Shin exhibited her photographs of Ye at the Kunsthalle Zurich in 2018, the rapper’s psychobabble and controversial views had reached new heights and were met with public frenzy. Showing the fresh-faced, younger rapper, sporting a hoodie and neon pink hair, and looking stalwart and intimidating, Shin’s images contrasted with the public image; looking back at them, I experience a sense of innocence: a pop star whose bipolar disorder weighed heavily on his conscience and whose vulnerability pierced through his stoic gaze with fury. Alongside the suite of Ye portraits, the artist also presented X-rays of her own body (with her pet dog), uncovering what lies literally beneath her skin. What feels perhaps performative or like an emblematic gesture for a certain kind of vulnerability in Shin’s X-rays, is laid bare in the images of the music impresario; his inner demons are visible across his face — there’s a glint in the eye of pure mischief. Seeking to unsheathe the sharp contours of our psyche, the underbelly of the self, what’s at the core — whether of a celebrity or even herself, the magic of Shin’s images is that as print media — advertisements, fashion editorial — they are often both straightforwardly legible and simultaneously revealing of what lies behind culture’s forward-facing, glossy veneer.
Whether it’s her Eckhaus Latta 2017 Spring campaign showing real couples fucking or her 2016 “Baby” series of newborns bloodily emerging from birth canals, there is an obsession of (graphically) presenting what lies beneath the shallow facade of a world covered in lies. A simple gaze inward that has tremendous effect. The works in Shin’s forthcoming Aspen Art Museum show are being made outside the studio, further complicating the relationship between reality and artifice, subject and artist.
Jasper Marsalis, Jacket and Shadow and Jacket and Shadow and Jacket and Shadow, 2023, installation view, Kristina Kite Gallery, Los Angeles. Courtesy: the artist and Kristina Kite Gallery, Los Angeles; photograph: Paul Salveson.
Like Li and Shin, the Los Angeles-born artist Jasper Marsalis endeavors to unearth the realities of what lies behind the construction of a public figure — something he investigates as both as a visual artist and a musical performer. He also goes by his hip-hop moniker Slauson Malone, and was formerly a member of the avant-garde musical troupe Standing on the Corner; as a visual artist Marsalis makes work that meditates on the relationship between audience and performer, viewer and creator, with a rhapsodic interest in collapsing those distinctions while also musing on their inherent differences. In his solo show at Kristina Kite in Los Angeles last year, Marsalis forced visitors to enter the gallery through the back entrance, lifting the curtain, so to speak, on what lies “back-stage.” Upon entering, the audience encounters a laptop (Face 1), a behind-the-scenes look at what’s feeding and programming both Face 2, a large LED screen capturing pixelated images of visitors, and Instrument 4, four stacks of speakers amplifying the minutiae of sounds that permeate the gallery (all works 2023). The result is a feedback loop of the visitors’ input that in turn becomes the immediate output of the work.
“My favorite music begins and ends with this tortured erotic ambivalence,” writes Holiday in her 2023 essay, reflecting that: “the most effective art is greedy about it, righteous and wicked at the same time, humble and opulent, minimal and spectacular, optimistic and despairing, unrepentant and begging for mercy.” Ye may have leaned too heavily into tortured ambivalence, but I find myself still listening to his music. Maybe it’s a quality that all good artists share. Certainly Li, Marsalis and Shin match Holiday’s description in being unrepentant when it comes to their craft, unapologetic when it comes to their own artistic visions, while showing reverence to their audience, paying them back with kindness and thrills.
Exhibitions by Shuang Li (a co-commission with the Swiss Institute, New York) and Heji Shin will be on view at the Aspen Art Museum from November 20–March 3. Jasper Marsalis’s exhibition runs from March 20–June 16, 2025.
Terence Trouillot is senior editor of frieze. He lives in New York.
