The product of a Chinese immigrant and a white polygamist from Fort Scott, Kansas, Ashley Yang-Thompson (aka Miss Expanding Universe) questions stereotypes with humor and irreverence. She works in a wide range of media, from hyperrealist oil paintings to coloring book memoirs to VHS poetry. In the past year, her videos were selected for The Museum of Moving Image’s Changing the Picture series, which highlights artists of color who are bringing diverse voices to the screen. Her video art, in conjunction with her zines and letters, is also currently being exhibited in the San Francisco Asian Art Museum’s After Hope: Videos of Resistance exhibition. In January of 2020, she was part of two person show at Gund Gallery museum, where she displayed her zines and letters alongside Axis Mundo, the first historical examination of queer Chicanx artists. She has been included in shows in New York City, Taiwan, Chile, and Philadelphia. She is a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Creative Equity Fellowship and Mass MoCA’s Assets for Artists grant. She has been awarded full fellowships at the Vermont Studio Center, Ox-Bow, and The Wassaic Project.
The pictures displayed are excerpts from Miss Expanding Universe’s growing collection of Worm House zines. Her “graphic-novel-strip-tease thing” revives zine culture’s nonconformist ability to disseminate transgressive ideas and socio-political commentary. Miss Expanding Universe’s paintings, zines, and ephemera confront issues of identity, mental health, and the pain-staking creative process through the lens of her socially annihilating humor. Please take note that Worm House would not be possible without her assistant/chauffeur/platonic husband/muse, Uncle Fingers and her lesbian lover, Gum Slut.
