Strong Women and Big Dogs Star in Amanda Ba’s Prismatic Paintings

When I met Amanda Ba in her Bushwick studio this spring, she had just returned from a trip to China, where she spent a month filming for a 15+ minute video premiering in September at Jeffrey Deitch in New York. The film is part travelogue, part staged: her father narrates in voiceover how various scenes relate to Jean-François Lyotard’s idea of a libidinal economy, describing how the concept has manifested in contemporary China.

Filmmaking is new to the artist, who turns 26 in September; so far, she has focused on painting. Strong female figures dominate her colorful canvases: they squat behind a big dog, an American Bully; or ride motorcycles and wrestle. The paintings, yes, thwart the racist stereotype that Asian women are meek and docile, but that’s not a statement Ba is trying to make. “I’m not looking specifically at gender roles and racial stereotypes, but they’re always present—probably because of who I am.” She says she’s “thinking about other things,” like posthumanism, construction, or critical theory.

This past January, Ba curated a group exhibition at James Fuentes titled “Re: Representation” that featured work by Asian and queer artists from London and New York, including Dominique Fung, Sasha Gordon, and Catalina Ouyang. She wrote that the pieces “create work nearby—rather than about—the notions of Diaspora and Representation,” borrowing the idea of “nearby” from filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha.

Ba was born in Ohio, where her father emigrated from China to pursue postgraduate studies in economics. Her grandparents raised her in Hefei, China, until she was five, when she reunited with her parents in the United States. She remembers her grandpa teaching her how to draw a three-dimensional popsicle when she was three. After that, she “was pretty obsessed with wanting to master every medium. So I drew anime. I drew cartoons. I did watercolors, colored pencil, and acrylic landscape paintings like Bob Ross.” Her obsession led her to Columbia University, where she double majored in visual arts and art history.

After Covid interrupted her senior year, Ba made it a point to spend time in London, where she had studied abroad. In 2021 she got her first solo show, at the London gallery PM/AM. “Ninety-five percent of all my opportunities throughout my career have come from Instagram,” Ba said, remarking that the platform makes for a dynamic portfolio that shows both your work and your personality.

An American Bully is present throughout her work, a reference to her obsession with the idea of posthumanism. She describes the spring 2024 collaboration she did with Chinese fashion label Sankuanz, which saw dogs on the runway, as the “theoretical agent.” “We organize our world around us and we treat animals and other living beings with various levels of respect, depending on how sentient or how useful they are to us,” she said.

Visiting her studio, I spotted a square canvas painted in red with faint outlines and asked about it. “I’m actually doing the vinyl album cover for that new Kristen Stewart lesbian movie, Love Lies Bleeding,” she tells me. “It’s going to be two women, wrestling kind of in the desert with a gun on the ground.”

While Ba initially wanted her upcoming Deitch exhibition to be about eroticism, much of it deals with construction, a subject that fascinated her while visiting China, where she witnessed the cycle of demolition and rebuilding as old structures came down to make way for new ones. In one painting, a woman floats in the Huangpu River along Shanghai’s skyscrapers; here, eroticism and construction meet in a surreal scenario. The giant naked woman, as big as the cityscape, lies in the body of water, displaying both her vulnerability and her power.