Artist Kim Sandara is perpetually caught up in the notion of duality. They are both sides of the coin, always combining two components to form the greater whole. This is true of their life as well as their art practice, which overlap quite a bit thanks to their autobiographical proclivities. The most prevalent dichotomies that Sandara explores in their work reside in their multidimensional identity as a queer South East Asian American. The child of immigrants, Kim is part Lao and part Vietnamese, and was raised in a household that honored South East Asian traditions. When they came out as bisexual as a teenager, they found that both their heritage and their sexuality marked them as an outsider. It is from this feeling of alienation that Kim developed Kin and Kang, twin characters, copies of Sandara, who embody opposing aspects of her personality.

The division of Kim’s identity into Kin and Kang is one of infinite methods of bisection. They can be split into Lao and Vietnamese, Asian and American, Eastern and Western influence. In their artwork, Kim produces both abstract paintings and representational narratives. They have a particular interest in the distribution of queerness into beauty and pain. But the characters of Kin and Kang are representative of factions that can be found in everyone: the internal and the external self.

Kin, depicted in all white, is the external self, who epitomizes Sandara’s outward feelings about others and the world. They are adept at receiving information and connecting with others. On the other hand, Kang, the internal self, symbolizes inner reflection. They are protective, always prepared to fight and defend the sense of selfhood. Portrayed in all black, Kang is a shadow figure, a silhouette. While their names and appearances make a discernible nod to the Chinese philosophy of yin and yang, they also denote personal meaning for Sandara. Kin comes from the English word ‘kinship,’ whereas Kang derives from the term “to fight,” or “compete” in Lao. As surrogates of themself, Kin and Kang both hold within them elements of Sandara’s heritage.

 Kim Sandara, Origins of Kin and Kang, 2019

In the creation of Kin and Kang, as well as in Origins of Kin and Kang, a stop motion animation which examines the circumstances of their conception, Kim taps into an art historical tendency also practiced by the illustrious Frida Kahlo. Like Sandara, Kahlo’s paintings deal with her biography, as a Mexican native born to a European father. While her mother was mestiza, her father was a German Jewish immigrant, a hybridity which stirred in Kahlo feelings of displacement and a fractured sense of self. This sentiment was amplified in 1939 when Frida underwent a bitter divorce from her longtime partner Diego Rivera. Feeling abandoned and left questioning her purpose, Kahlo produced some of her most intense and emotional self-portraits during this time.

One such painting, perhaps her best known, is a dual self-portrait titled Las Dos Fridas. As with Sandara’s Kin and Kang, the two figures are identical likenesses of the artist, each seated and turned at a three quarter angle toward the other. Their body language is mirrored, knees touching, hands clasped, while their opposite hands rest in their laps. Being duplicates of the same woman, the figures are near carbon copies, but the most marked difference between the two Fridas is the way they are dressed. The Frida on the left wears a neck high white lace dress, reminiscent of Victorian era gowns, where the Frida on the right dons a yellow- striped blue top and a long green skirt in the traditional Tehuana style. Though both women are expressionless, the viewer is given hints about their temperaments, as each has an exposed anatomical heart visible on her chest. While the Mexican Frida bears a full, red heart on the surface of her clothing, the European Frida has sliced her own chest and cut her heart open, the surgical pincers she used still bleeding as they sit in the lap of her white skirt.

This violent self-desecration stems both from the turbulence of the artist’s relationship with her husband Diego and from Frida’s persistent grappling with her dual identity. These biographical elements are especially intertwined as the same fervent nationalism which drove Diego’s political views also carried over into his preferences about what Frida wore and how she styled her hair. It was no secret that Diego wanted Frida to look Mexican, not European. Thus, the gemination that Kahlo carries out is not only an illustration of her multifaceted heritage, but also an act of retaliation against Rivera.

Shortly after the completion of Las Dos Fridas, and still aching from the pain of an agonizing divorce, Frida painted Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair in 1940. Fresh off the heels of heartbreak, Kahlo deals another blow at her ex- lover by chopping off her long beautiful hair, usually depicted in a traditional braided crown atop her head. Here, her short hair is slicked back behind her ears and she sits wide- legged in a wooden chair wearing neither a Mexican nor European dress, but an oversized man’s suit. Though this portrait only includes one sitter, it addresses duality in another way. The dichotomy here is not in Kahlo’s ethnic heritage but in her gender performance, as both male and female.

Gender and sexuality are themes that Kim Sandara examines in their artistic practice as well. their bisexuality, and the concealment of their queer identity from their parents, are some of the elements from which the characters of Kin and Kang are born. In Origins of Kin and Kang, Sandara illustrates a scene of herself passing in front of the doorway of their high school’s gay/straight alliance meeting. This event, pulled from a memory, indicates Sandara’s denial of their own sexuality in a sacrifice on behalf of their family. As they explain in the accompanying audio, they didn’t want their queerness to disappoint their parents, who had endured so much loss and suffering to make a life for them in America.

Conversely, where Sandara’s sexuality denotes constraint, Kahlo used her own as a weapon. Bisexual herself, Frida Kahlo feminized herself on Diego’s request. Now that the two were divorced, she shed herself of both her delicate Tehuana garments and her girlish appearance. She intended to punish him by presenting masculine, a means of indicating her queerness visually.

Kahlo and Sandara each hid their sexualities for their loved ones’ convenience, withholding parts of themselves for the comfort of others. It is only in their minds, and later in the expression of their artworks, that they were able to reveal the components they had hidden away. Thus, it is no surprise that each would develop alter egos, unmasking the figures who existed solely in the darkest corners of their minds.

Although Sandara shares with Frida Kahlo the themes of dual self-portraiture and queer sexuality, stylistically the two have little in common. Sandara works both representationally, where her monochromatic style is influenced by graphic novels and printmaking, as well as abstractly, a method in which Kahlo never experimented. Sandara’s abstract paintings are alive with light and movement, cleverly balancing the white of the page with the color of her brushstrokes. She has expressed in interviews that her calligraphic technique is influenced by the work of Julie Mehretu, a young but established Ethiopian-American artist with acquisitions like MoMA and the Brooklyn Museum under her belt. Similar to Sandara, Mehretu prefers broad strokes and bold crisp marks, intense whirls of color with hints of stippling throughout. Each artist taps into a vast range of mark making, keeping their paintings fresh and unexpected. Still, Sandara and Mehretu have more in common than their sweeping motions and frenzied cyclonic compositions.

Born in Ethiopia, Mehretu can relate to notions of relocation and refuge. Like Sandara’s parents, Mehretu and her family fled to escape political uprisings in their home country. The emotional upheaval of having to abandon her home, combined with the indignation over political injustices has had significant influence on her artmaking. Though her canvases are mostly abstract, viewers can pick out the colors of flags, references to maps and military symbols, and other broadcast media imagery alluding to conflict on a global scale. This adds a certain weight to her work, as those appreciating its beauty must also peer behind a curtain of grief.

The same is true of Kim Sandara’s paintings, especially their most recent series, the 270 Million Project. Comprised of black and white ink paintings, the series resembles their larger body of music-inspired abstractions, but the title reveals a much more personal connection for Sandara. “270 Million” refers to the 270 million bombs that the United States dropped on Laos during the Vietnam War, of which about 80 million did not detonate. The project Sandara produced in response was their attempt to take action, the result of their frustration, anger, and pain, but also a testament to their drive, and their desire to translate those emotions into a restorative output. As with the rest of their paintings, Sandara made each work in the series while listening to music. The sole caveat for the 270 Million Project is that the songs which inspired each of the paintings were all in Lao. At the completion of the the project — 270 paintings total, with each painting representing one million American cluster bombs dropped during the Vietnam War Era — Sandara donated a portion of the sales of half of the paintings to Legacies of War and the other half to COPE, both nonprofit organizations working to remedy the harmful effects of the bombs in Laos. Thus, the remedial benefits of the project are twofold, in that it offered Sandara a platform to share their grief, their culture, and their artistry, at the same time as allowed them an opportunity to give back to those in their community, shining light on a largely unknown but gravely important issue.

Aside from the direct connections to Frida Kahlo and Julie Mehretu, Sandara’s work also pulls influence from the fields of stop motion animation and cut paper assemblage. One could easily draw a connection to the work of William Kentridge, whose charcoal-on-paper stop motion films comparably incorporates elements of autobiography and self-portraiture. Further, the jointed puppets which Sandara poses in order to make her characters move recall the work of Kara Walker who, while best known for her cut paper installations, has produced several animations which utilize jointed paper puppets tracing back to her first film from 2004 entitled Testimony: Narrative of a Negress Burdened by Good Intentions. Since each time a puppet is moved into a new pose the composition is reset, every frame of a stop motion animation can be read as a unique work of art, a phenomenon which calls to mind some of the earliest studies of photographic technology such as Eadweard Muybridge’s sequential cabinet cards The Horse in Motion. The puppets as well are works of art in their own right, and Sandara often displays them alongside their video installations as a peak into their artistic process.

A skilled craftsman, a visionary, and an activist, Kim Sandara has fought to be where they are today. Though Kin and Kang were developed from Sandara’s feeling of being an outsider, they are determined to elbow her way in, centering their heritage and identity as part of the conversation. Origins of Kin and Kang tells the story of how their alter egos came about and why. As a teenager struggling to navigate their selfhood, they needed them to protect them. Now, having determined their path, Sandara has retired Kin and Kang. They can defend themself. They know who they are, and they are prepared to speak up.

270 MILLION PROJECT, RAISING AWARENESS AND FOSTERING ACTION

Kim Sandara and Aleena Inthaly from Legacies of War Reflect on the Vietnam War Era Bombings

Transcription of 270 Million Project, Raising Awareness and Fostering Action

Kim Sandara is a queer, Lao/Vietnamese, artist based in Brooklyn, NY. In 2016, they graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art, with a BFA in General Fine Arts. They have been featured in VisArt's Gen 5 exhibition, the Torpedo Factory's 2019 Emerging Artists exhibition and the Washington Project for the Arts’ 2019 Auction Gala.

Elizabeth Skalka received her Master of Art in the History of Art and Archaeology from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts; she completed her Bachelors of Fine Arts in Art History, Theory and Criticism at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland. Skalka has worked at art museums and galleries in both New York and Chicago including Wrightwood 659 and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She assisted with educational research and production of learning materials as the Graduate Education Intern with the Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell University. Skalka resides in New York.

Townsend extends special thanks to Elizabeth Skalka, Aleena Inthaly, and Legacies of War for their generous contributions to Townsend’s presentation of KIM SANDARA, ORIGINS AND LEGACIES.