Soft Sell, by Kayla Tange, currently on view at Last Projects in LA, displays the heaviness Tange has experienced as an adoptee, sex worker, and person with chronic pain. The Claysties, Ceramic Pasties, and Ceramic Work Shoes nod to Tange’s wit and the pain these items ensue after hours of wear and use for performance. The thought of lifting and using them puts the viewer into Kayla Tange’s shoes, literally and metaphorically, where suffering and false faces are put on for luring a client in. Sculptures made from old costumes present delicate disturbing imagery of internal organs.

Tange sat down to discuss the internal connections and conflicts she longs to make sense of with her solo exhibition.

Kayla Tange: My parents were children during the internment camps, the Japanese internment camps, during WW2 and they struggled a lot. They wanted me to choose a more practical career so I think that was a lot of fear for me around not thinking it was possible.

I took a lot of different avenues to here. I went to school for special effects makeup and for fashion. I was trying to study all these different things. I also was an eyelash extension technician for like a decade. I did headshot makeup and made costumes for people. I did wardrobe and makeup for music videos and things like that where I felt it was creative but maybe I guess still more consistent than selling work, which felt very foreign to me.

I started stripping in 2005 and so that felt very performative and creative for me. I never really felt like I wasn't doing creative things just because I wasn't necessarily in the art world. I always feel like that's complicated.

I guess my first art show was in 2015 but I never thought that what I was doing before wasn't art also.

Jahcinda Law: What you are doing has its own category, it is definitely becoming a new art form, bringing burlesque and sex work into the art scene. Do you want to talk about being a woman in that role and having the actual power in sexual situations and the way you present that in the art you make? Where does that come from?

KT: It’s been a long time coming. These topics have been historically presented by male painters and you never really knew who the subject was. There was no credit, sometimes there was no face. So I guess it's complicated cause there are still institutional hierarchies.

A lot of this work can be shown but maybe people who are actually sex workers aren't necessarily always invited to speak, so I still think there's problems.

We all created a cooperative called Striper Co-op. We put our own shows on and those are a lot of the shows that I feel the most comfortable performing in because conditions are not always ideal when other people are inviting you to perform. I feel like a lot of the best scenarios are ones that you have to create for yourself.

For a long time I took pretty much any gig that I could, that I was asked to do, because I felt like if I didn’t then I wouldn’t get more opportunities or that I had to get my name out. A lot of those gigs were, you know, just not ideal, not safe, not ideal, not paying a lot and yeah were pretty uncomfortable. I mean I’ve been doing this for 20 years and it's taken that long to be more discerning.

JL: For someone coming in with fresh eyes, what are you trying to get them at the end of the show to think about? Are you thinking about those messages that you are portraying?

KT: I want to convey kind of preconceived ideas about erotic labor and chronic illness and adoption.

I mean this is my personal story obviously, a lot of people can relate to those issues individually, but I just wanted to make a show about how they intersect for me and what that looks like at least with my personal story and how does one process all this grief that is really layered and complicated.

I just needed to process also not being able to perform for a couple years. I thought that I was retiring because I was in so much pain and had so many health problems. So I started making a lot more work with the mindset of like, well what do I do if I can't do this thing anymore that I’ve been doing for so long and that I love doing.

I've since partially recovered so I perform still but I don't do it as much. I only perform maybe a couple times a year but that's not that much considering I was doing, I don't know, probably like seven to ten gigs a week which is insane.

It was my job for so long and it was really hard but I loved it and I also hated it, but then when it was gone I was really sad, I didn't know what to do any more so I started to work on all these other mediums to figure stuff out.

JL: You talk about your childhood, growing up being an adoptee and the current work that you're doing, how do you connect those topics together?

KT: I was thinking a lot about, I guess that economics tie to human trafficking.

You know I love my adoptive parents, this is not any criticism on them, it's more a criticism of South Korea and the way that the adoptions were handled.

The paperwork being extremely messy to the point where a lot of adoptees don't know their real birthdays and how these were all afterthoughts and these are people's lives, these are human beings that have no idea how old they are and its basic things that, I think, if you're not adopted you kinda take for granted knowing your parents or knowing the story around your birth or knowing your birth date, things like that. I was thinking about how a lot of adopted people are born into this world with this already heavy sense of labor and economics surrounding their birth and how much money adoptees made for South Korea.

So I was thinking about how I kind of got into sex work by accident because I needed money and then how easy it was for me to transition into that role. It felt very natural and I felt very comfortable in an openly transactional environment. Obviously I've had very different feelings about it throughout the years and it wasn't all positive and all good and empowering there was definitely some bad dark things that happened too but I started to realize that

And I'm not speaking for everyone and it's not like I think that everyone needs to go do what I did, but because I kinda fell into it I started to think about how it did become empowering for me at some point because I didn't really have any control over my adoption, I didn’t have control over how much money the transaction was. In my own mind I kind of created meaning from this other experience that I did choose to get involved in and that I could decide whether I wanted to do certain things for a certain amount of money or whatever.

I was also thinking about the sexual slavery in Korea with the comfort women and the camp towns. Thinking about how a lot of this history was kinda tied to the military and even the United States being involved especially in the camp town’s sex work. Thinking about the history that a lot of Korean women have gone through in the past 100 years being seen as bodies that were disposable and feeling really disturbed by all that wondering how I can recon with all of that?

I don't know that I am there yet in my journey. I feel like I am at a point where I’m making work about it.

I made a film about my adoption called Dear Mother in 2019, and I really started to think more about it when I got breast cancer and then I got endometriosis. I had 4 surgeries in a year and I had a lot of time to think. I was thinking a lot about the medical system in the United States and how terrible it is.

If you don't have good health insurance how you're in a vulnerable situation. Thinking a lot about adoption and the single mothers that were targeted to give their babies up, were in a vulnerable position to make decisions that I don't think they really wanted to make.

JL: Where does the Soft Sell title come from?

KT: There are multiple meanings but actually my friend Luca helped me come up with the title. We were thinking about, I think it's in business or something but also in adoption like Korean babies were kind of a soft sell, it's a coercive way of selling it's not direct selling or a hard sell. You are kind of being manipulated or seduced into believing that something is good.

It's something I think is not talked about a lot. There's a lot of things that are shrouded in mystery.

So yeah we were thinking a lot about just that or even the medical industry and how that's very shrouded and unless you’ve had a lot of injuries or illness you kind of don't really know what's going on and you have to really advocate for yourself.

Even thinking about sex work and how you’re selling your body in a seductive way. You have to be able to read people's body language and in business, people that are really good at selling, you think of people that close deals, they need to be good at psychology and thats obviously different in sex work cause theres are different things you watch out for like is this person going to harm me? Am I in a dangerous situation? You almost have to size up the situation or the person in a few minutes and I think being a savvy business person, being a sex worker, being really savvy with understanding insurance when dealing with hospitals and doctors, it's like this other skill and this other way of selling things.

JL: Why ceramics for the show?

KT: Ceramics offered a way to translate fragility and resilience into form.

A ceramic heel or pastie is delicate, breakable, yet also enduring, mirroring the tension between a dancer’s body as commodity and as archive.

Clay also carries histories of touch, labor, and fire. Its process reflects survival and transformation, which aligns with the show’s themes.

JL: What do the nipple covers/pasties represent?

KT: Pasties are tools of both concealment and spectacle. They mark the line between exposure and censorship, intimacy and transaction.

As objects, they point to erotic labor, the commodification of desire, and the ways women’s bodies get both hyper-visible and erased at the same time.

By remaking them in unexpected materials, I shift them from accessory into artifact, evidence of labor, survival, and refusal.

JL: What does the case number on the ceramic bikini refer to?

KT: The case number comes directly from my adoption file. It marked me as a legal subject before I was ever recognized as a person.

Using it in the work confronts the bureaucratic systems that commodified my body, connecting adoption, sex work, and medical files as different registers of being processed.

JL: Are the soft sculptures (Intergenerational Rapture) vaginal on purpose? If yes, why? If no, are they teardrops? Is there an intent with the shape?

KT: They are intentionally ambiguous. Some read as vaginal, others as teardrops, breasts and some even intestinal.

I am interested in how the body is always projected onto objects—desire, grief, organs, wounds. The forms blur between intimacy and abstraction, refusing a single reading. They hold space for multiple kinds of embodiment including sexuality, mourning, and illness.

JL:Why are they red and black? They also feel intestinal, are there connections to blood and chronic pain?

KT: They are also made with mostly old costumes and accessories that were once worn on stage by me.

Red and black are visceral, charged colors: blood, mourning, and eroticism. They tie to my chronic pain and surgeries, but also to strip-club aesthetics such as lipstick, darkness, and spotlight.

The palette collapses glamour and grief, pleasure and suffering.

Chronic illness leaves you hyper-aware of the body’s insides, especially when they betray you. The intestinal resemblance references that vulnerability. By externalizing what is usually hidden, the sculptures make the invisible labor of illness visible, showing how it coils through daily life like a second, private anatomy.

Written by Jahcinda law

Images: https://www.kaylatange.com/

https://www.instagram.com/kayla.tange/