Amanda Ba speaks the language of archetypes

“Hell is Real” flashes across the canvas in one of Amanda Ba’s 2023 paintings, a lone female figure racing down a highway on a motorcycle. It feels like the entry point to a world you think you recognize: cinematic, restless, apocalyptic, yet quietly layered with reflections on national identity. Ba’s canvases resist easy definition, sighs suspended in pigment, questions that refuse to settle. Look closer, and the work opens up.

Ba logs onto Zoom after a detour to an AMC theater in Midtown, where she’d just picked up a Tamron lens off Facebook Marketplace. A detail that feels fitting: practical, funny, slightly cinematic. In our conversation, she talks about the motifs running through her paintings, how watermelons became a loaded symbol, and why New York is still the only place she wants to paint.

hube: You often speak of an apocalyptic undertone in your work.

Amanda Ba: I keep motifs in an arsenal: things I’ve researched for past shows that I can redeploy as needed. In my last show, which was about sports, that tone wasn’t as present; I was working with a different idea. But my first solo show in London had Titanomachia, a frieze-like painting of figures and dogs tussling. The background could read as primordial or dystopian. It suggested creation, but also something Martian, like a desert in the future.

I’ve never been overly concerned with chronology. My figures and environments are archetypical, so desolation can feel like the past or the future. I’m not trying to declare “the apocalypse,” but my next body of work, circling violence, might bring that tone back.

h: Your early life spanned vastly different geographies, from Columbus to Hefei to New York. Have those shifts in place and pace taught you to perceive time or space differently?

AB: My location definitely factors into my work subconsciously, but the effect is usually delayed. I need contrast to reflect on what a period of time meant. Splitting my time between Ohio and my hometown in China gave me a sense of what else is going on outside of big cities. Sometimes I’m glad I didn’t grow up in New York; though I used to be really jealous as a teenager, growing up in Middle America probably made me friendlier and helped me understand why sociopolitical trends in America tend to drift the way that they do. And most of America is like Columbus, where it’s harder to access cultural pipelines. There, the internet becomes your main source of information.

On a larger scale, my childhood made me more inquisitive about global relations, especially between China and America. The average American is starting to sense China’s development on a different political and historical model than the West expected. I’m always thinking about perspectives on historical timelines, and how we have come to think of our national identity, versus someone else in a different place, thinking of their national identity. And philosophically, time is colonial; standardized time was developed with British naval exploration to standardize shipments. Before that, clocks relied on gravity, and didn’t work on ships, which led to competitions to invent a stable timekeeping device at sea. You can trace that to the Atlantic slave trade. So, time is a big question, too big for me to fully answer, but that’s where my thoughts go.

h: Do you feel people in those non-urban environments are more attuned to their surroundings, maybe even closer to a posthumanist way of being? Or is that just a romantic idea?

AB: It’s a really hard question, as there are different measures for what it means to be “attuned to your surroundings”. People in big cities all want and strive for something, which is why we choose to live in places that are so difficult in many ways. But there’s connectivity, and through collective efforts, scenes and communities develop, and you can situate yourself in a web. In more suburban places, things come to you by proximity, whereas in New York, everything is in a ten-mile radius, so you have more ability to choose who you spend time with. In small towns, you engage with whoever’s around, valuing everyone’s presence more because your social pool is smaller.

h: In the world of your paintings, do watermelons grow differently? Do they hum or rot in slow motion, or hold memories? What kind of logic do they obey?

AB: I love watermelon—it’s really celebratory. In my first show, I identified it as an interesting motif because I wrote a little essay all about watermelons as the “ethnic fruit”, in the sense that there are a lot of racial connotations with watermelons in America stemming from the time of slavery. It was for a zine which had examples including Doja Cat dressed like a watermelon for the song Juicy, and the earlier poor taste meme culture of Watermelondrea. It got me thinking about how watermelon is consumed very differently across cultures. In the U.S., it’s cut into nice little sterile pieces and packaged. Same with a pineapple, as they’re just too inconvenient. But in other cultures, due to the messiness of eating it, watermelon becomes a festive food.

The fleshiness and redness of the fruit, and how it decomposes and becomes quite gross, was also popular for certain genres of still lives in the Western canon. Frida Carlo also painted a lot of watermelons, but they are not commonly depicted in paintings, so it’s interesting to explore when and why they are. In my mind, it’s a loaded fruit. People don’t just paint an apple; they paint a watermelon—the watermelon seems to carry more significance.

h: If you could spend a few quiet months painting in any U.S. state, where would you go?

AB:  Is it a cop out to say I would just stay in New York? I’m more influenced by research, reading, and sociopolitical events than by my environment. I’m always thinking, what is the theme that I’m working around? Where is my research leading me, and how can I augment the visual language to fit that? Not the other way around of what do I see, what do I feel?

And my friends here in NY offer the intellectual input I trust. My environments are built from research and conversation, not my immediate surroundings—but I’m qualifying it by saying “as of right now”. I would love to have a landscape arc down the line where I just paint beautiful things.

h: Do you ever think of your day-to-day habit, from clothing to going out with friends, as a palette that sneaks into the studio, consciously or not?

AB: I go through on and off periods, so I don’t have a normal work day—I have a work year. I basically turn myself on for six to eight months while working towards a show and have to eliminate distractions. I have to make myself immune to FOMO so that I can just work, and then after that, I have two to three months where I reset.

Day to day when I’m in work mode is always the same. I wake up and pretty much from the moment my eyes open to when I go to bed, I’m thinking about work. I reserve my free time for things I shouldn’t miss, like birthdays or really fun parties.

h: Your figures resist fixed outlines, always dissolving, always in flux. How do you navigate that in relation to the female nude, which carries so much historical weight and expectation?

AB: I’m still working with that. I try to populate the visual sphere with enough images that the female body is not a big deal. Clothes are signifiers, so if I want to avoid placing a figure in a specific time or place, I make them naked, so they’re archetypical. And I do want to start painting men, but I need to figure out how to use them.

h: If your paintings could dream at night, what do you think they’d dream about? Do you imagine them having inner lives once you’ve left the studio?

AB: I don’t imagine the figures I depict as having deep internal lives—they’re just stand-ins, gateways for viewers to enter the image. I keep their expressions ambiguous to obscure intention. They’re functional pictorial elements, not fleshed-out characters.

h: Do certain colors ever feel like memories to you? Not just tied to them, but as if they are memories, carrying the weight, mood, or distortion of something half-remembered?

AB: Not individual colors, but palettes. My China show used nostalgic, concrete tones from earlier Brutalist architecture there. My sports show used stark primary, synthetic colors. My Ohio show used earthy greens and drabber tones. Color only gains meaning in context with other colors.

h:  If you had to describe your work in five words, what would they be?

AB: Difficult. Interrogative. Charged. Peculiar. And the fifth would depend on the theme—maybe “Asian” for now.

h: Do you think of your shows as distinct chapters, like separate novels, or as a single narrative that just keeps unfolding?

AB: They’re more like essays circling different topics from the same interrogative standpoint. I tend to identify conditions and pose questions rather than deliver heavy-handed critiques. My interests in politics, anthropology, history, and cultural foundations often guide the work, so ideally the paintings nudge the viewer in a certain direction. But ultimately, they’re meant to remain open to interpretation.

h: What are you working on right now, if you’re open to sharing?

AB: I’m thinking about making my next body of work on violence, though it’s still in the very early stages. It’s a subject that feels palpable to everyone, yet it can be incredibly sensitive. The question I’m grappling with is how to create images that interrogate violence without becoming violent images themselves, since images can so easily turn exploitative. I’ve been looking at historical examples from artists like Otto Dix, Leon Golub, and Philip Guston, and I’m about to read Guston’s memoir by his daughter to better understand his context. I don’t have any paintings yet, I’m still in the process of reading and researching.