Image: Vincent Price Art Museum, Washington ; Bruce Tom
The Vincent Price Art Museum will present 'Anida Yoeu Ali: The Buddhist Bug' from September 26, 2026, through May 22, 2027. The exhibition opens with a reception on September 26 from 2 to 5 p.m. at VPAM in Monterey Park, and the museum identifies the presentation as the first major solo exhibition of the series in the United States.
According to VPAM, 'The Buddhist Bug' is an expansive performance project that combines myth, humor, spiritual inquiry, and the lived experience of displacement. The work centers on a monumental saffron-colored creature that is nearly 328 feet long, with a human face tightly framed in cloth at one end and a pair of feet at the other. The project is activated through performance, photography, and video, and moves through markets, temples, streets, rural landscapes, and other social spaces across Cambodia.
The museum says the project reflects Anida Yoeu Ali’s relationship to Cambodia, diasporic memory, and transnational belonging. Its bright orange color evokes Buddhist monks’ robes, while the cloth around the Bug’s female face recalls the hijab and points to the Cham Muslim community, an ethnic and religious minority in Cambodia to which Ali and her family belong. In that layered form, the exhibition frames questions of visibility and erasure, faith and cultural difference, homeland and exile.
Ali, born in 1974 in Battambang, Cambodia, works across performance, installation, video, new media, public encounters, and social practice. VPAM’s exhibition text says she was raised in Chicago and is a first-generation American of Malay, Cham, Khmer, and Thai ancestry. Her practice examines faith, migration, race, gender, and political history through larger-than-life personas that challenge inherited narratives and restrictive representations.
The exhibition includes images from the series dating to 2012, 2014, and a live performance still from the Seattle Asian Art Museum in 2024. VPAM also notes that the show is co-curated by Sonia Mak, executive director of Asian Arts Initiative, and Steven Wong, director of the Vincent Price Art Museum. The exhibition is organized by VPAM at East Los Angeles College.
Support for the exhibition comes from The Mike Kelley Foundation as lead supporter, with additional support from the LA County Department of Arts and Culture as part of Creative Recovery LA, an initiative funded by the American Rescue Plan, and from Pasadena Art Alliance. VPAM says the museum will be closed on the opening reception day, and its regular hours are Tuesday through Friday, 12 p.m. to 4 p.m., and Saturday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
