Kayla Tange

Kayla Tange (b. South Korea) is a Los Angeles-based multidisciplinary artist working in video, installation, sculpture, and performance. Adopted into a Japanese American family, her work reclaims personal and collective histories through archival practices, found materials, and text, exploring themes of belonging, displacement, and transformation. She engages the legacies of colonization, the global adoption industry, and Japanese American incarceration.

Performing as Coco Ono, she addresses spectatorship, labor, bodily autonomy, and illness, using dark humor and satire to confront the commodification of emotional and physical labor. Her work blurs the line between art and social practice, as seen in co-created projects like Stripper Co-op, Cyber Clown Girls, Sacred Wounds, and Private Practices: AAPI Sex Worker and Performance Art Collection at Los Angeles Contemporary Archive. Collaboration and community-building are central to her practice, transforming stories of shame into symbolic value.

Tange’s work has been presented at Highways Performance Space, Human Resources, REDCAT, Ford Foundation Gallery, OUTFEST, and the Asian Pacific Film Festival. She has received support from the California Arts Council, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, AHL Korean Foundation, and ONE Archives at USC Libraries. Her work has been featured in PAPER, LA Times, and X-TRA.

I create work across sculpture, video, and performance. Using text, plexiglass, and legal and medical records, I examine autonomy, power, and survival. My practice navigates the bureaucratic and institutional structures that have shaped my experiences with Korean adoption, erotic labor, and chronic illness—exposing the tensions between control and resistance, intimacy and surveillance, hypervisibility and erasure.

As an adoptee, erotic laborer, and someone living with chronic illness, documentation is both a constraint and a tool of reclamation. I incorporate adoption files, childhood footage, surgical imaging, strands of hair, and deconstructed costume pieces—each material charged with personal and symbolic resonance. These elements function as living archives, blurring the boundaries between body and record, artifact and memory. Poetry and language, translation, and the gaps in understanding that follow displacement.

Costumes hold the energy of transformation, illusion, and escape. They become sculptural remnants of performance—objects that carry the residue of the body, embodying both fantasy and labor. Archival video and performance footage overlay fragmented memory, creating nonlinear timelines that collapse past and present, evoking dislocation, survival, and desire.

Nightlife aesthetics—neon lighting, saturated colors, textures of glamour and excess—punctuate my work, echoing the duality of spectacle and vulnerability. These visual languages contrast with themes of loss and commodification, complicating the boundary between persona and person. My performative persona, Coco Ono, dissolves the distinctions between artist, subject, and performer, embracing contradiction and multiplicity.

Moving between galleries, performance venues, film festivals, and underground spaces, my work resists containment. Through embodied narratives and charged materials, I explore what it means to claim autonomy within systems that seek to define, categorize, and control the body.