Iris Yirei Hu
Bio: iris yirei hu (b. 1991 / Los Angeles, CA) makes paintings, installations, and words with the medicine of storytelling and the insistence of survival. She is moving towards rearranging our habits of listening, learning, and life making with her ancestors, spirit guides, family, friends, and lover. Selected exhibitions include: Survival Guide: joy, Visitor Welcome Center, Los Angeles (2017); Con/Safos with Rafa Esparza & Clockshop, Bowtie Project, Los Angeles River (2015), and The Floor and the Cane, Commonwealth & Council (2014). She received her BA from UCLA and lives and works between New York and Los Angeles.
Thesis Exhibition
Artist Statement
spirit sister
handstitched
a companion for my tears
the sashiko blues
i have for you
index and thumb, each wave
expanding in f(our) directions
crisscrossing surfer
i have you in my pocket
waiting for your breath
to make indigo dye
in the hands our Pacific Mother
∞
in loving memory of emi kuriyama
Excerpt from Survival Guide: joy
[...]
Sister lover, the water has evaporated into thin air, and left me with a drought of unfamiliar stasis. I wish I could protect you, and hold your head against my chest. But I’m realizing now that it is no longer “I,” that the eternal breath of the earth is embracing both of us with a loving silence. I like listening to the silence. I want to propose that silence is a refuge of potential built for learning, strategizing, and assembling with love and song. In our shelter, deep listening becomes one of the necessary modes of survival, an active ingredient of empathy. I have been making a body of images that honors a life cut short, but one that also taught me how to make life with others through shared stories bound by love and fury, care and vigilance. This life moves out of a generative and cooperative “we,” united through our difference, agile enough to pivot in surprising directions, weaving between you and me, our family, our clan, our land, and the Great Spirit. Here, our motivation is emancipatory joy. In the words of emi: “so here I am inviting you in.”
Love,
iris
L to R: Survival Guide: joy (10′ × 23′ × 10′, Installation, acrylic, oil, textiles, and collage, 2017); surviv(all), (60″ × 48″, Excerpt from “Jo$$ Money | The Surplus [Survival Guide]” by emi kuriyama Embroidery on burlap, 2017)