‍Miki: I'm a multidisciplinary artist making work and writings about utopia, cyberfeminism, and a syncretic esotericism. My dad is Japanese (3/4 Japanese, 1/4 Finnish), and my mom is Indian, so I've spent my whole life at the nexus point between merging cultures—an experience that typifies life in a city like Vancouver.

My cyberfeminist identity is focused on an analysis of the current zeitgeist—a hypermediatized, Ballardian society (more so than on the fetishization of technology). My work across various mediums is the vehicle for materializing my vocation, which is urging the cultural compass in a direction that encourages entry into the psychological states that are a threat to patriarchal capitalism, and that threaten the trans-epochal suppression of our innate occult puissance.

After a period of time spent living on the street, I became involved with a group of homeless, ascetic esotericists, and my time spent with them had a lasting impact on my occult practice, which has, in turn, informed my art practice.

Miki: I was born in Singapore, and my family immigrated here when I was 4, so Vancouver is my home. I've lived in Barcelona for a year, which had a deep impact on me, particularly living in an environment with such delightful architecture: at times organic and bizarre (Gaudi), at times shamelessly ornate, so different than the city planning of Vancouver / most relatively new North American cities, which are aesthetically marred by excessively utilitarian urban planning and architecture.

Miki: I'm part of the underground music / rave "community". I'm interested in rave culture for their sociological impact, their impact on the fabric of human bonds—what kind of bonds can be created between people in contexts where, whether through the aid of substances or sober, people are mining the subconscious and having formative life experiences in each other's company? Entering hypnagogic states while moving their bodies in a synchronized rhythm for hours at a time together?

A lot of the raves I go to are underground events (technically illegal), I'm not really into the big ticket, big budget raves. Because of their illicit status we have to manage all aspects of production; for that tiny fraction of time of the wellbeing of attendees, health and safety,

community policing, etc., is managed by the orgs, so there is, in a way, the experiment of a tiny microcosm of what a community beyond the default template of kyriarchal Western mass culture might, if only for a moment, feel like. This is only a semblance of real community though, I think true community is anomalous under Western capitalism which is hyper-individualist by nature.

Miki: I understand disability in art by observing the people in my immediate social circle. So many of the people I know deal with disabilities that I can't help but have my scope of this centered immediately around the artists that I speak to. Disability and artmaking go hand-in-hand, and a lot of the people I engage with suffer from mental or physical health ailments. Anyone in the art world would wince at the stereotype of the troubled artist, the romantic bleeding heart who can't deal with the world and suffers from mental health issues, the trope written in entertainment media by people who don't really know what the art world is like. Because in 2022 the archetype of an acclaimed artist is someone who is efficient, productive, and perfectly well adjusted to late stage hyper-capitalism.

Each new cultural zeitgeist comes with a trendy new guise for the same production-oriented values. The same essence with a buzzy new patina of pseudo-identities for people to slip into. Artists think and feel like they're validating the arts in the face of anti-intellectualism by leaning into the grinding expectation of mass production to validate the status of the profession as "serious" and quash these images from pop culture. Which creates a strange zone for those artists who actually are mad, bleeding-heart romantics (lol) who are physically unable to crank out 25 paintings a month because their hands shake too much, or their pain is too great.

But this isn't necessarily a weakness. If my hands are shaking from the psychic weight of a collective sense of uncertainty that's been going on since the start of the pandemic, it's that same attunement to a cultural mood that informs the concepts in my work. So I would rather be disabled if the disability is the physical materialization of a certain disposition that is ill-suited to late-stage hypercapitalism, yet integral to the particular type of work that I'm making, and my vocation, than not be disabled at all.

Miki: I'm super inspired by Niki de Saint Phalle for firstly, her survival of abuse and alchemizing her pain into her work, and secondly, for her impulse to build the Tarot Garden to challenge the notion at the time that women were less capable of building art on such a phenomenal physical scale. Sometimes I pray to the spirit of Niki de Saint Phalle to give me strength! Hah! I also feel a strong affinity to the Mad Pride movement, it informs the mindset that allows me to continue to produce work and challenge retrograde notions of what it means to be a human being.

Miki: The inspiration for the project came from my Fluxus-inspired Happenings that I began hosting with my friends, creating beautiful and disruptive moments that were a testament to our stance that to be human in the material realm is to relish in the potential aesthetic delight that can be activated in as many places and to the fullest saturation possible, for the sake of stoking the fire of the innate creative lifeblood humanity, and for protesting against the notion that our only purpose is to work (and not to, for example, bask), and lastly, to galvanize the joy experienced by aesthetic beauty into motivation for spiritual and revolutionary endeavours.

As Cyprian Norwid says, “Beauty is to enthuse us for work, and work is to raise us up”. To paint a picture, for one of the Happenings I brought my harp to a creek in the woods at night, and surrounded by candles we played music in and sat in and around the stream. The natural extension of this Fluxian practice was to create sublime moments with and for people who are typically priced out of luxurious / comfortable / awe-inspiring settings.

My other inspiration for making this is because when I was homeless I fell in love with someone who eventually suffered severe brain damage from meth use. So I wanted to take the pain I felt about this and build an artwork dedicated to him and the friends who I lost from that time in my life mostly to overdoses, and build something made of all the love that I wanted to give to them but couldn’t.

It'll be taking place at Gallery Gachet in February [2023]. Their director, Moroti George, has been a major supporter of the project.

Miki: The street population are constantly berated by the message that they should be trying harder to improve their quality of life, but the tasks that this involves require a tremendous force of will, without any immediate pay off in the form of pleasure, whatsoever. A vital need for immediate, free, accessible pleasure and beauty—the kind of pleasure and comfort that gives you the strength to go on after a hard day (how often is one of the days when you’re living on the street a hard day—nearly every single one!) and the kind of beautiful surroundings that give you a sense of personal integrity (is it possible to feel like you are valuable if the only spaces you are allowed access to look visually destitute and clinical? If every space, in their lack of aesthetic care, connotes the idea that you deserve the bare minimum? What does that do to the subconscious of a demographic?)

And when you think about the work that is in front of this demographic when it comes to lifting themselves up out of dangerous environments, people are struggling with a huge undertaking, without any of the beautiful moments that those in the middle class used to fuel us in our day.

How many times do we have a hard day and restore ourselves with a nice cup of tea and looking out the window, or buying ourselves a delicious treat?

These little moments of beauty, comfort and pleasure are the fuel that give us the motivation to do what we need to get done. And the tasks before someone who is unhoused to lift up their situation, their to-do list, is absolutely arduous and draining. Where can people going through this draw strength? Acid Praxis: Resting Ground for the Weary is a social practice immersive installation that seeks to fill the gap of this very need by creating a beautiful moment to be experienced by the unhoused and substance using community of vulnerable downtown residents, and to provider a visual reminder of an innate human dignity through an environment designed with noble, psychologically nourishing, exquisite aesthetic care and thoughtfulness.

Miki: I feel the spirit of the mad pride movement informing my process. The very act of creating art work as a mad person instead of allowing ourselves to have our identities dictated by the often reductive rhetoric of the health care industry and then having that rhetoric reinforce the desire to neuter that part that is unable to find comfort and identity in the current social reality is in the spirit of madness. The artwork becomes a testament to that place in us—a gesture in support of the critical spirit of mad pride. It's an integration and acceptance of the part that is not able to acquiesce to the normative mode of operation.

Miki: There are schools of esoteric thought from various cultures that haven’t been adopted into the Western body of accepted “truth”, and with this status of exclusion from the institutionally verified truth comes a socio-cultural denigration of those concepts.

A cultural attitude that derides or disrespects these schools of thought has negative implications for decolonization. That isn’t to say that it’s necessary to believe all knowledge from all cultures to be true, but to not at least strive to hold these ideas with a courteous neutrality is to totally succumb to the Western global hegemony perspective.

Miki: Disability activism threatens the social order because we’re living through a history marked by a transcultural, intergenerational repression of the occult, propagated by that Western global hegemonic mindset, that creates barriers for us to understand the esoteric information passed down by our ancestors. This denigration of occultism directly maintains the dominant social order.

If people who see spirits and have visions are institutionalized because their experiences aren’t in line with the global hegemony’s acceptance of what is real, then the Mad Pride ethos, if it were to inform institutional policy, would have a huge shake up on all frameworks of society. Institutions would not immediately be allowed to dismiss these things as the marks of illness.

Of course, this is not to say that diseases like schizophrenia aren’t real, or don’t require medication. It’s to say that there is so much nuance in between the current climate, one that is grappling in the wake of an inter-generational occult repression, and an environment that more delicately parses through the demographic of people who are, for example, seeing spirits. Some of which likely would need treatment, and some who would not.

Miki: The double financial burden comes from being simultaneously an artist but also disabled, not being physically able to work a 9 – 5 but also needing to work on art to survive, haha. There’s an expression, “Only be an artist if you can’t do anything else”. This can be seen as a burden but most of the time, I just see it as a reflection of the wild absurdity of the current labour economy, and I feel liberated laughing at it because at least the strangeness of the things you go about doing, the microscopic tasks it entails to create each work, is always striking you with the clanging noise of the inanity of defining our sense of self by our productive output, and you are disrupted from being lulled more deeply into the hypnosis of the labour identity.

Miki: I agree that professionalism culture is an element of white supremacy and colonialism. There’s certainly the echo of the colonizers entering societies where civilizations were thriving and claiming that the mode of functioning being employed to execute the work at hand is "savage" and "barbaric". Professionalism culture is a shadow of the primordial colonialist ideology, but that being said, I don't know if tackling white supremacy in the workplace would automatically undo some of the negative aspects of professionalism culture. Professionalism culture has become so integral to working society that even if we were to decolonize the workplace—however that might look—the spectre of professionalism culture would remain.