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Lucy MSP Burns is Associate Professor in the UCLA Asian American Studies Department. Burns’s writings include Puro Arte: Filipinos on the Stages of Global Empire (NYU Press, 2014 Outstanding Book Award in Cultural Studies by the Asian American Studies Association) and the co-edited anthology California Dreaming: Place and Movement in Asian American Imaginary (2020, University of Hawai’i Press). Burns’s Your Terno’s Draggin’: Costuming Filipino American Performance was published in Women & Performance Journal 21.2. Burns is working on a second monograph, Asian American Elsewheres. As a dramaturg, Burns has collaborated with BIPOC inter/multidisciplinary theater- and dance-makers David Rousseve/REALITY; Leilani Chan/TeAda Productions; Priya Srinivasan; and R. Zamora Linmark.
When asked about the place of fashion in her work, diasporic performance artist Anida Yoeu Ali turns to a line from her poem “Camp”: "We arrived with nothing but the clothes on our backs.” She adds, “[The family experience of displacement and dispossession] led me to work with textiles— mainly garments and soft sculptures that can be compressed, flattened, folded, and ultimately portable. … When I arrive at the exhibition site to “unpack” them, they are then sculpted to take up space, shape, and volume, becoming something else. The garments as performance-installation have an unavoidable hypervisible presence.” Ali summons the “othered,” “marked,” or the “stranger’s” body with garments and dynamically sculpting textiles. Through embodied performance, which opens out the intimacy of self with others, Ali asserts presence yet emphasizes transformation. She designs her various personas —“different skins,” as she calls them—to be hypervisible and visually impressive, building on contrast, manufactured difference, conspicuousness, and spectacle. They are conceptualized as such to expose the question of who or what the real threats are, the real nuisance, and the world order that creates and maintains inequality and injustice.
Through performance art, Ali stages her intersecting, overlapping, intertwined, and ever-evolving identity as a diasporic Khmer from a refugee family raised as a Cham-Muslim American in the United States. “Fashion design was my dream major in college, but it never manifested for me because I felt family pressure to select a more practical major.” This interview centers Southeast Asia’s constitutive influence on Ali’s development as an artist traversing sociality in a post-9/11 world through her interdisciplinary art. Ali speaks to the formative experience of expulsion and dislocation from war, inhabiting “different skins,” and Muslim futurities replete with playfulness, abundance, beauty, and joy. Various works, such as The Vertigo Dress, The Buddhist Bug, and The Red Chador series including The 99, illustrate the hybridization of religious aesthetics to disrupt ideas around otherness. For Ali, “the fabrics serve as both a storytelling device and a costume and sculptural element that extends the body’s surface and assumed character into specific time-space intersections.”
Textiles acquired in Southeast Asia are central to Ali's aesthetics. Of note for this special issue on Fashion and Southeast Asia is how Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, and Vietnam animate Ali's fashioning of garments, particularly the multisensorial experience of textiles in Southeast Asia. Ali embraces the mix of silks, batiks, “wacky patterned synthetics and crazy embellished, colorful textiles,” in her words, the use of ikat techniques and silk weavings onto limitless patterns, and the infinite possibilities of fusing traditional designs onto contemporary silhouettes. The open-air markets where Ali shops for these textiles provide insights into Southeast Asian fashion. These outdoor public bazaars are unlike indoor, air-conditioned, aisle-organized department stores that are more typical in most of the global North. In the outdoor bazaars, textiles are openly displayed and factor into Ali’s designs as she adapts to what is available. For Ali, the interactive, unpredictable, and haptic nature of the textile markets of Southeast Asia constitutes what is in fashion.
Fashion in Ali’s work can be thought of in the poetic tradition of “deep image,” once described by 19th-century Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud as a “systemic derangement of the senses” in its stylization, dreamlike reliance on images, exploratory state of mind, and sensorial experience of space. [1] Her work invites as it confronts and draws in with its scale, color, shapes, spectacle, and strangeness. Ali directs fashion’s possibilities to startle, to invite a meditation on how we inhabit the world and how the world inhabits us.
Through performance art, Ali stages her intersecting, overlapping, intertwined, and ever-evolving identity as a diasporic Khmer from a refugee family raised as a Cham-Muslim American in the United States. “Fashion design was my dream major in college, but it never manifested for me because I felt family pressure to select a more practical major.” This interview centers Southeast Asia’s constitutive influence on Ali’s development as an artist traversing sociality in a post-9/11 world through her interdisciplinary art. Ali speaks to the formative experience of expulsion and dislocation from war, inhabiting “different skins,” and Muslim futurities replete with playfulness, abundance, beauty, and joy. Various works, such as The Vertigo Dress, The Buddhist Bug, and The Red Chador series including The 99, illustrate the hybridization of religious aesthetics to disrupt ideas around otherness. For Ali, “the fabrics serve as both a storytelling device and a costume and sculptural element that extends the body’s surface and assumed character into specific time-space intersections.”
Textiles acquired in Southeast Asia are central to Ali's aesthetics. Of note for this special issue on Fashion and Southeast Asia is how Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, and Vietnam animate Ali's fashioning of garments, particularly the multisensorial experience of textiles in Southeast Asia. Ali embraces the mix of silks, batiks, “wacky patterned synthetics and crazy embellished, colorful textiles,” in her words, the use of ikat techniques and silk weavings onto limitless patterns, and the infinite possibilities of fusing traditional designs onto contemporary silhouettes. The open-air markets where Ali shops for these textiles provide insights into Southeast Asian fashion. These outdoor public bazaars are unlike indoor, air-conditioned, aisle-organized department stores that are more typical in most of the global North. In the outdoor bazaars, textiles are openly displayed and factor into Ali’s designs as she adapts to what is available. For Ali, the interactive, unpredictable, and haptic nature of the textile markets of Southeast Asia constitutes what is in fashion.
Fashion in Ali’s work can be thought of in the poetic tradition of “deep image,” once described by 19th-century Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud as a “systemic derangement of the senses” in its stylization, dreamlike reliance on images, exploratory state of mind, and sensorial experience of space. [1] Her work invites as it confronts and draws in with its scale, color, shapes, spectacle, and strangeness. Ali directs fashion’s possibilities to startle, to invite a meditation on how we inhabit the world and how the world inhabits us.
Installation view of “Vertigo Dress” at ‘Out of Sight’ Exhibition at Bumbershoot 2023, Image courtesy of the artist.Lucy Burns (LMSPB): Could you speak to your interest in fashion, mainly how you see the relationship between fashion and your multidisciplinary performance artwork? What does fashion bring to your performance art?
Anida Yoeu Ali (AYA): As a little girl, I obsessively played with paper dolls and created looks with the Barbie Fashion Maker Machine—a toy I was given one Christmas by a local church. In high school, I spent an entire semester working with a local fashion industry mentor to create my own fashion line, mainly through “high-fashion” drawings of extravagant haute couture dresses. Expressing myself through clothing is probably a trauma response rooted in my family’s refugee story of arriving with nothing but our clothes. Growing up, I looked forward to Eid prayers and celebrations just to see what others wore. I felt so much joy being surrounded by the colorful, ornate, and heavily embroidered and patterned textiles from around the world. My love for fashion is evident in my performance art.
Anida Yoeu Ali (AYA): As a little girl, I obsessively played with paper dolls and created looks with the Barbie Fashion Maker Machine—a toy I was given one Christmas by a local church. In high school, I spent an entire semester working with a local fashion industry mentor to create my own fashion line, mainly through “high-fashion” drawings of extravagant haute couture dresses. Expressing myself through clothing is probably a trauma response rooted in my family’s refugee story of arriving with nothing but our clothes. Growing up, I looked forward to Eid prayers and celebrations just to see what others wore. I felt so much joy being surrounded by the colorful, ornate, and heavily embroidered and patterned textiles from around the world. My love for fashion is evident in my performance art.
Anida Yoeu Ali performs in “Vertigo Dress,” rice field outside of Phnom Penh, 2012. Photo by Vinh Dao, Image courtesy of the artist.“Working in this region means being resourceful, adaptable, and responding quickly to what’s available in the markets.”
LMSPB: You’ve spoken about your family’s experience as refugees fleeing the Khmer Rouge genocide. Tell us about the link between your interest in fashion, particularly in the form of textiles, and themes such as fugitivity, displacement, and whimsy in your creative work.
AYA: The line is about my family’s refugee experience and our literal arrival with nothing except what we carried on us. The poem is part of a solo show where I first used textiles as an interactive installation, not simply as a set design. This led me to work with textiles—mainly garments and soft sculptures that can be compressed, flattened, folded, and ultimately portable. My packable garments expand into soft sculptural installations. When I arrive at the exhibition site to “unpack” them, they are then sculpted to take up space, shape, and volume, becoming something else. The garments as performance-installation have an unavoidable hypervisible presence, a theme important to my fluctuating identities of Asian/American/Refugee/Muslim/Mother/Woman.
AYA: The line is about my family’s refugee experience and our literal arrival with nothing except what we carried on us. The poem is part of a solo show where I first used textiles as an interactive installation, not simply as a set design. This led me to work with textiles—mainly garments and soft sculptures that can be compressed, flattened, folded, and ultimately portable. My packable garments expand into soft sculptural installations. When I arrive at the exhibition site to “unpack” them, they are then sculpted to take up space, shape, and volume, becoming something else. The garments as performance-installation have an unavoidable hypervisible presence, a theme important to my fluctuating identities of Asian/American/Refugee/Muslim/Mother/Woman.
Exhibition View of “Anida Yoeu Ali: Hybrid Skin, Mythical Presence” 2024, Image courtesy of Seattle Art Museum.“Southeast Asian fashion sensibility exudes a relationship between the traditional and the contemporary.”
LMSPB: How would you describe contemporary Southeast Asian fashion that influences you, and what is incorporated into your creative practice?
AYA: Southeast Asian fashion sensibility exudes a relationship between the traditional and the contemporary. This experimentation—mixing old and new, local and foreign—resonates with me as a diasporic artist with a transnational practice.
I love Southeast Asia's open-air and wholesale markets and find so much inspiration from searching and bargaining with vendors in floor-to-ceiling crammed stalls. Regionally, there aren’t dedicated air-conditioned department stores or big fabric store chains to shop at for textiles. Cambodia, like other open-air markets in Southeast Asia, receives the leftover fabric and remnants from Chinese textile factories. Thus, it’s nearly impossible to create anything that would require using one consistent fabric type or pattern. Working in this region means being resourceful, adaptable, and responding quickly to what’s available in the markets. Before searching the markets across multiple countries, I may have an idea or sketch for something very specific but find myself adjusting the idea to what is available.
The markets are magical for me because they represent Southeast Asia's energy, heat, and excitement. It’s such a strange mix of luxurious silks, traditional batiks, wild and wacky patterned synthetics, and crazy embellished and colorful textiles. Some of the most impressive and inspiring textiles are newer fashion designs made with textiles using centuries-old ikat techniques or silk weavings but with a new silhouette. I will be incorporating these unique and expensive fabrics into the final iteration of The Red Chador series, The 99 project. Designing these garments in a range of materials and patterns is the ultimate celebration of Islamic cultures across the globe as it honors the historical importance of the “Silk Road” and how Islamic traditions traveled between Africa and Asia.
AYA: Southeast Asian fashion sensibility exudes a relationship between the traditional and the contemporary. This experimentation—mixing old and new, local and foreign—resonates with me as a diasporic artist with a transnational practice.
I love Southeast Asia's open-air and wholesale markets and find so much inspiration from searching and bargaining with vendors in floor-to-ceiling crammed stalls. Regionally, there aren’t dedicated air-conditioned department stores or big fabric store chains to shop at for textiles. Cambodia, like other open-air markets in Southeast Asia, receives the leftover fabric and remnants from Chinese textile factories. Thus, it’s nearly impossible to create anything that would require using one consistent fabric type or pattern. Working in this region means being resourceful, adaptable, and responding quickly to what’s available in the markets. Before searching the markets across multiple countries, I may have an idea or sketch for something very specific but find myself adjusting the idea to what is available.
The markets are magical for me because they represent Southeast Asia's energy, heat, and excitement. It’s such a strange mix of luxurious silks, traditional batiks, wild and wacky patterned synthetics, and crazy embellished and colorful textiles. Some of the most impressive and inspiring textiles are newer fashion designs made with textiles using centuries-old ikat techniques or silk weavings but with a new silhouette. I will be incorporating these unique and expensive fabrics into the final iteration of The Red Chador series, The 99 project. Designing these garments in a range of materials and patterns is the ultimate celebration of Islamic cultures across the globe as it honors the historical importance of the “Silk Road” and how Islamic traditions traveled between Africa and Asia.
Live Performance of The Buddhist Bug on March 23, 2024 at the Seattle Asian Art Museum, Photo by Bruce Tom, Image courtesy of the artist.LMSPB: What are some of the various ways you have explored fabric, and what has that allowed you to do with bodies in public spaces?
AYA: Performance is a means for reinventing the self and the personas I have created inhabit different “skins”—meters and meters of textile extend my body’s surface into public spaces. I have broadened my interest in narrative-based work by extending from my body to ‘tell my story.’ I use fabric to extend myself—literally reaching out to other bodies through textiles. This can be seen in a range of works in which I’ve allowed myself to have a lot of fun creating my designs.
The Vertigo Dress comprises two black and white striped dresses, each with a huge flexible circular hem structure. The hemline has a long, flexible inner tube that helps to sculpt the dress into a cumulus cloud-like train. It was an experiment in taking rigid linear lines out into the lush landscape of rice fields, an attempt to free the body from rigid confines, experiment with color and shapes onto my body, and set it against the Cambodian rural landscape.
The Buddhist Bug uses the most fabric in my current work, where over 100 meters creates a lengthy orange tubular creature that is both Muslim and Buddhist, with only the face and legs exposed. The Buddhist Bug represents my own spiritual turmoil between Islam and Buddhism and explores issues of displacement and belonging. The Bug seeks to map a new spiritual and social landscape through the creature’s surreal existence amongst ordinary people and everyday environments.
The White Mother performance outfit combines a traditional Tsunokakushi, a Japanese bridal headdress, with an all-white, loose-fitting contemporary outfit. In the performance, I push a white stroller with my 6-month-old baby dressed in a red onesie. The costumed woman and child represent the Japanese flag as a symbol of nationhood. We, mother and child, travel through the city of Fukuoka in this day-long durational performance. White Mother was developed as a form of public intervention created based on interviews with Japanese working mothers about their challenges with motherhood. Spaces selected for her public encounters included a subway station, a popular coffee shop, a busy cafeteria, a shopping mall, museum/gallery—all sites where Japanese mothers felt unwelcomed with their babies. With this piece, I ask: Who or what is the real nuisance in a society where birthrates are at a historical low?
AYA: Performance is a means for reinventing the self and the personas I have created inhabit different “skins”—meters and meters of textile extend my body’s surface into public spaces. I have broadened my interest in narrative-based work by extending from my body to ‘tell my story.’ I use fabric to extend myself—literally reaching out to other bodies through textiles. This can be seen in a range of works in which I’ve allowed myself to have a lot of fun creating my designs.
The Vertigo Dress comprises two black and white striped dresses, each with a huge flexible circular hem structure. The hemline has a long, flexible inner tube that helps to sculpt the dress into a cumulus cloud-like train. It was an experiment in taking rigid linear lines out into the lush landscape of rice fields, an attempt to free the body from rigid confines, experiment with color and shapes onto my body, and set it against the Cambodian rural landscape.
The Buddhist Bug uses the most fabric in my current work, where over 100 meters creates a lengthy orange tubular creature that is both Muslim and Buddhist, with only the face and legs exposed. The Buddhist Bug represents my own spiritual turmoil between Islam and Buddhism and explores issues of displacement and belonging. The Bug seeks to map a new spiritual and social landscape through the creature’s surreal existence amongst ordinary people and everyday environments.
The White Mother performance outfit combines a traditional Tsunokakushi, a Japanese bridal headdress, with an all-white, loose-fitting contemporary outfit. In the performance, I push a white stroller with my 6-month-old baby dressed in a red onesie. The costumed woman and child represent the Japanese flag as a symbol of nationhood. We, mother and child, travel through the city of Fukuoka in this day-long durational performance. White Mother was developed as a form of public intervention created based on interviews with Japanese working mothers about their challenges with motherhood. Spaces selected for her public encounters included a subway station, a popular coffee shop, a busy cafeteria, a shopping mall, museum/gallery—all sites where Japanese mothers felt unwelcomed with their babies. With this piece, I ask: Who or what is the real nuisance in a society where birthrates are at a historical low?
Anida Yoeu Ali, “Interstellar, The Red Chador: Genesis I” 2021, Floor of the Bellevue Art Museum, Bellevue, USA. Photo by Bruce Tom, Image courtesy of the artist.LMSPB: Let’s focus on how your upbringing and practice as a Cham Muslim are part of your performance work. Your work has been part of exhibits exploring “modest” or “pious” fashion and the dynamic ways clothing is a form of expression within Islamic cultures and societies, as it is in other societies. The Red Chador series, with its newest iteration in process, The 99, features full-body-length garb that covers the hair and body. What notions of self-expression from the teachings of Islam influence these two works?
AYA: Cham-Thai-Malay-Khmer Muslims have our chador called the telekung—it is a garment covering our clothes used only for prayers. Telekung is not a commonly recognized term in reference to hijab covering. This prayer garment has always been part of my upbringing. It covers completely except for the hands and face. They're usually in plain white cotton but can also be embroidered. The women in my family use the simple white prayer cloaks in daily prayers and the more embellished “special” sets for congregational Jummah or Eid prayers. Mine is very special and was gifted to me as a teenager, one I cherish and will most likely pass on to my own daughters.
Covering has been part of my upbringing, but we were never forced to do it. We were never told we had to do it in public—only during prayers or at the mosque. So, for me, being veiled is absolutely a choice and never mandatory.
The personas I create transcend confinement and ideas rooted in absolutism because they are hybrid forms mixing and matching, reinventing and reimagining possibilities. I say this so that you understand The Red Chador (2015) is a mix of aesthetics borrowing from Islamic cultures, Catholic bishops, Star Wars Imperial Guard, Prom Queens, Pride parades, and my own failed attempts at being a fashion designer.
The Red Chador is an orthodox Muslim woman dressed in a red sequin chador and veil, someone who was ready to fashionably debut at the ball or go dancing at a prom. Except she didn’t go dancing; instead she spends her days silently walking and quietly disrupting public spaces, inserting her politicized body in spaces where she is both welcome and unwelcome. My works are feminist assertions, providing women with choices and agency to be seen in a world that often refuses to see their humanity and complexities.
The 99 is a new extension of The Red Chador series conceived as a public participatory installation in which museum and gallery patrons have the opportunity to rummage through a rack of 99 chador garments and select which chador they would like to dress in.
The series began as a response to alienation and erasure, Islamophobia and homophobia, misogyny, and state-sanctioned violence, but it has always been my intention to complete the series as a future-looking piece placing Muslim imaginaries into conversation with joy, beauty, and resilience. The 99 is an invitation for the public to act in solidarity with Muslim women as it offers the public a direct way to engage and experience covered bodies in a more vivid and celebratory manner.
Each of the 99 chadors, celebrating haute couture fashion, will be uniquely created from textiles sourced in Southeast Asia, specifically from Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, and Vietnam—countries that have all contributed to shaping my ethnic heritage.
![]()
Live Performance of The Buddhist Bug at the Sultan Mosque, Singapore, 2015. Photo by JNZL, Image courtesy of the artist.
All this is an attempt to bring conversations and visibility to people who wouldn’t typically engage, especially when the topics are in and around politics and religion. I want to do this in a fun and vibrant way and provoke some questions: Why can’t pious Muslim women have some fun, color, sparkle, and fabulousness in their lives? Does Allah (God) care what color our chadors are? Do we have to wear only white or black? Isn’t God colorblind anyway?
For more about Anida and her work, visit anidaali.com
Notes: Fashioning Deep Image
[1] Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters, a Bilingual Edition. Translated with an introduction by Wallace Fowlie. Foreword by Seth Whidden. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 2005.
AYA: Cham-Thai-Malay-Khmer Muslims have our chador called the telekung—it is a garment covering our clothes used only for prayers. Telekung is not a commonly recognized term in reference to hijab covering. This prayer garment has always been part of my upbringing. It covers completely except for the hands and face. They're usually in plain white cotton but can also be embroidered. The women in my family use the simple white prayer cloaks in daily prayers and the more embellished “special” sets for congregational Jummah or Eid prayers. Mine is very special and was gifted to me as a teenager, one I cherish and will most likely pass on to my own daughters.
Covering has been part of my upbringing, but we were never forced to do it. We were never told we had to do it in public—only during prayers or at the mosque. So, for me, being veiled is absolutely a choice and never mandatory.
The personas I create transcend confinement and ideas rooted in absolutism because they are hybrid forms mixing and matching, reinventing and reimagining possibilities. I say this so that you understand The Red Chador (2015) is a mix of aesthetics borrowing from Islamic cultures, Catholic bishops, Star Wars Imperial Guard, Prom Queens, Pride parades, and my own failed attempts at being a fashion designer.
The Red Chador is an orthodox Muslim woman dressed in a red sequin chador and veil, someone who was ready to fashionably debut at the ball or go dancing at a prom. Except she didn’t go dancing; instead she spends her days silently walking and quietly disrupting public spaces, inserting her politicized body in spaces where she is both welcome and unwelcome. My works are feminist assertions, providing women with choices and agency to be seen in a world that often refuses to see their humanity and complexities.
The 99 is a new extension of The Red Chador series conceived as a public participatory installation in which museum and gallery patrons have the opportunity to rummage through a rack of 99 chador garments and select which chador they would like to dress in.
The series began as a response to alienation and erasure, Islamophobia and homophobia, misogyny, and state-sanctioned violence, but it has always been my intention to complete the series as a future-looking piece placing Muslim imaginaries into conversation with joy, beauty, and resilience. The 99 is an invitation for the public to act in solidarity with Muslim women as it offers the public a direct way to engage and experience covered bodies in a more vivid and celebratory manner.
Each of the 99 chadors, celebrating haute couture fashion, will be uniquely created from textiles sourced in Southeast Asia, specifically from Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, and Vietnam—countries that have all contributed to shaping my ethnic heritage.
Live Performance of The Buddhist Bug at the Sultan Mosque, Singapore, 2015. Photo by JNZL, Image courtesy of the artist. All this is an attempt to bring conversations and visibility to people who wouldn’t typically engage, especially when the topics are in and around politics and religion. I want to do this in a fun and vibrant way and provoke some questions: Why can’t pious Muslim women have some fun, color, sparkle, and fabulousness in their lives? Does Allah (God) care what color our chadors are? Do we have to wear only white or black? Isn’t God colorblind anyway?
For more about Anida and her work, visit anidaali.com
Notes: Fashioning Deep Image
[1] Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters, a Bilingual Edition. Translated with an introduction by Wallace Fowlie. Foreword by Seth Whidden. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 2005.
Issue 13 ︎︎︎ Fashion & Politics
Issue 13 ︎︎︎ Fashion & Politics