Ever since she began living in the storefront of C.Y.N.K. Gallery, Chelsea Ayumi Koga has become a bit of an Ypsilanti phenomenon. The artist, who specializes in “durational art” (art that is characterized by the period of time it was produced over), moved into the space a few weeks ago with three simple rules: no clock, no phone, no outside. The art piece, which averaged over 30 visitors per day, has turned into something of a social experiment.
People’s World sat down with the artist during the piece to have a conversation about isolation, loneliness, and what it means to be human.
The piece—which is called My New House—is a work of performance art in which the artist, Koga, lives in a gallery window for two weeks, on display the entire time. Originally, Koga had conceived the piece as a feat of endurance. “I went into it thinking it was just gonna be like this challenge of, how do I fill up the container of two weeks when I can’t go anywhere and I have nothing to do?” But it quickly morphed into something else. As people realized Koga’s door was always open, visitors began to trickle into C.Y.N.K. from across Ypsilanti. Word spread, and her ‘new house’ quickly became a destination.
Since then, she has added an additional rule.
“No boundaries,” she said, laughing. Koga realized the potential of the piece lay in its unpredictability. “I set up the conditions for the piece—I’m stuck in this gallery space for two weeks with no phone and no clock—but whatever happens after that is sort of the art itself, you know?” This meant she had to “get out of the way” of her visitors so performance could unfold.
“Part of [the inspiration for] this piece is that I’m lonely,” Koga said. “The original name for this piece was I Want You to Come to My House (I’m a Very Lonely Person). And my mom was like, ‘you cannot do that cause people will think this is something else.’ And I definitely agree with her. I wanted the piece to be neutral, like people can come and not feel pressured to be one way or the other.”
For a long time, Koga said, she welcomed that isolation. Before living alone for several years, Koga lived with a long-term partner in a relationship that consumed much of her energy. “I think with him, I was so enmeshed that I’d lost touch with some kind of inner voice,” she said, so it was important for her to spend time in solitude in order to re-establish that connection with herself.
Koga’s piece is the antithesis of that. Her little storefront “home” is cozy and inviting. The largest object in the room is a low table, surrounded by pillows. On the table, Koga keeps a miniature tea set and a pile of little beanbags to play with. During the day, sunlight streams in from the large windows. At night, the room is softly lit by a table lamp and ambient lighting from the street.
The room always has people in it. They are usually lounging on the pillows or sitting on the floor, and they almost always seem at home. A lot of them have only just met Koga, but they all call her Chelsea and speak to her like an old friend. It’s an oddly familiar experience, like going back in time and sitting on your parents’ sofa from when you were a kid, yet at the same time, the experience is dynamic and present. And it’s clear that feeling is shared by many of Koga’s visitors, as more often than not, they return after their initial visit to talk with her. Some have even made the visits a daily practice.
“I have regulars,” Koga joked.
When I asked what she thought was driving the frequent visits, Koga was wistful: “I think people are lonely.”
“When you’re alienated…something happens to you. Like you try to reenter society in some way and you don’t have these practiced [social] skills and you don’t understand that there’s this degree of training or this responsibility [involved].” Koga referred to the process of losing those skills as “de-socialization.”
Alienation manifests in two forms: subjective and objective. Subjective alienation occurs when a person feels “estranged” or disconnected from the larger social picture. This causes people to feel listless or that their lives lack meaning. Objective alienation, however, occurs when a person is prevented from developing their capabilities as a person (whether physically, creatively, intellectually, or emotionally). According to G. W. F. Hegel and Karl Marx—the German philosophers who originated the concept of alienation—objective alienation is the cause of subjective alienation: people feel their lives are meaningless because society doesn’t enable them to live a full human experience.
The causes for this “objection alienation” are endless. One of the most basic points has been a major area of reflection for Koga: space. “This is nicer than my apartment,” she said, gesturing to the little room, “so I think about that.”
“I’ve lived in like really shitty housing and it’s terrible to just be inside. Like, the air is bad and it’s falling apart and it’s like a slumlord fucking owns it. So you’re just looking for distraction. And people talk about ‘oh people are so distracted’ but it’s like, people are distracting themselves for a reason.”
One of the most difficult points of reversing “de-socialization” is finding that entry point. For some in Ypsilanti, Koga’s piece has served as that point.
“There’s this one younger man who comes a lot and…tells me about his struggles with other people. The first time he came in here, he was like, ‘I haven’t talked to somebody in like five days, I’ve been so socially anxious.”
And Koga responds the way she does with all of her guests: by listening and being present and allowing her guests to shape what the piece is. A word the artist repeatedly used while describing the piece was “social sculpture,” referring to the fact that it was the human activity that served as the contents of the art in the piece, rather than the physical objects that constructed the space.
Koga’s experiences interacting with her guests, a majority of whom have been male, inspired her to advocate for a collective responsibility for people’s socialization. “When that labor is divided amongst everybody… It’s not as much pressure on like one person,” she said. Koga went on to say that in many ways, the two-way street of constant social access reflects an ideal condition, where people are embedded in a community and able to seek support from one another without overburdening their friends and neighbors.
While the loneliness epidemic had begun long before COVID-19 forced everyone to stay indoors, the pandemic acted like an accelerator, causing people to become more suspicious of one another. I asked Koga how COVID influenced her piece.
“It definitely plays into it,” she said. “I think people were really shown how damaging…isolation is by [COVID], so I think people are ready for this kind of work and are excited to engage with it.”
While Koga says she and her partner embraced the isolation COVID brought at the time, she has since moved on from that version of herself. “I’m ready to deal with and embrace…living with people… I’m ready.”
The “social sculpture” aspect of the piece, however, is not without tension. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Koga in many ways functions as the “art object,” as she is the “object” on display in the gallery that people continually return to see.
While it was Koga’s intention to lean into this aspect of the piece by literally displaying herself in a storefront window, she has become somewhat troubled by it as the days have passed.
“There’s absolutely no way that my race and my gender…isn’t affecting this piece,” Koga said, reflecting on the dynamics she experiences with her visitors.
Often in society, women are expected to make space for other people emotionally. They are conditioned to prioritize others, even when it comes into conflict with their own needs. Furthermore, harmful racial stereotypes that depict Asian women in general (and Japanese women in particular) as fetish objects are common in Western media.
“When you’re a cis man, you’re kind of like the tabula rasa [blank slate],” she said, referring to how people interpret an artist’s work. “For me, there’s these lenses [based on gender and race] that people view my work through.”
For a long time, Koga said, these dynamics prevented her from exploring performance art. That changed for her when she had the chance to do an open studio program in Ireland through her school. The program, which intentionally lacked a clear curriculum, caused Koga to think about the materials she always has access to. “[I realized] I have time, I have my body, and I have like, garbage. So that’s where my art now is coming from.” Now Koga says that when she gets an idea, she has to try it, not allowing other people’s projections to get in the way of her creative process.
Despite that, however, in a dynamic social piece such as My New House, those identity factors still play some role, as no one is truly a blank slate. “One thing I’ve been saying is I feel like I’ve been rehearsing for this piece my whole life,” said Koga. “I’ve been in the customer service industry for 12 years… I am trained in sociality.”
As mentioned earlier, the majority of Koga’s visitors have been men, many of whom she had previously never met. She speculated that a lot of the young men who had become invested in her over the course of the project were likely responding to that emotional availability. “I think maybe I’m like multiple people’s girlfriends right now, a little bit.”
Koga drew a parallel between those relationships and Japanese hostess bar culture. “It’s kind of like comfort women. But in like a corporatized sense,” she explained. “You go to a bar… and a woman, like a pretty woman, comes and she kind of just flirts and hangs out with you all night.”
“Which is like… I dunno. It’s just part of the piece, y’know.” It was something, Koga admitted, she was still struggling to grapple with.
Koga’s experience spoke further to the developing themes of the work: Koga’s guests, who had become alienated, had begun to alienate her, unable to resolve their unmet social desires.
But overall, Koga refused to let the complexities of social practice overshadow the performance as a whole.
“I have a lot of precedents. A lot of the people I look at [as inspiration] are Asian and women, and I think that gives me some confidence, like some kind of self-efficacy representation confidence. Like a lot of the people who were doing this work in the 60s and 70s were a bunch of freaky Japanese people and women and queer people.”
Among her influences, she listed Linda Montano, Marina Abramović, Tehching Hsieh and “I don’t know… fucking Yoko Ono!” Koga also mentioned Gutai, the postwar Japanese art movement which laid the groundwork for conceptual and performance art as it’s now known.
“I think that there’s a tie between endurance art and oppression, for sure, right? Because you have to endure this life. And you have to endure this body. And you have to endure everything. [laughs] And, like, I think that because we have to come up with so many constructions and we have to like work so much on having a sense of self clarity in a world that is constantly telling us who we are, we start to hone it as a craft…and it makes it easier to consider this kind of stuff art.”
Chelsea Ayumi Koga is a Southeast Michigan-based artist. She was born in Irvine, California, but has spent the majority of her life in Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor. More of her work can be found on her Instagram @chelseaayumikoga.
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