Desperate, Scared, But Social at UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art

2025 California Biennial: Desperate, Scared, But Social (detail of Emily’s Sassy Lime vitrine) (2025). Image courtesy of the artists and UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art. Photo: Yubo Dong, ofstudio.

The 2025 edition of the California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA), curated by Courtenay Finn and Christopher Y. Lew with Lauren Levig, borrowed its title Desperate, Scared, But Social from the debut album of the 1990s riot grrrl punk band Emily’s Sassy Lime to explore the theme of adolescence. While “desperate” and “scared” capture the “awkwardness, anxiety, and myriad pressures” of being a teenager, as described by the exhibition curators, “social” was the operative word.¹ The Biennial is anchored in the practices of 12 artists, tracing a constellation of relationships that demonstrate how work can result from social bonds. Throughout the exhibition, formal dialogues and thematic crossovers often emerged out of the artists’ personal connections to one another, rather than from art historical references. Featuring a stunning array of ephemera including zines, letters, and diary entries alongside artworks, Desperate, Scared, But Social reversed the usual logic of the exhibition to center the narratives of people circulating within a social sphere, rather than those of images circulating within a gallery space. The Biennial’s presentation of ephemera next to and as artwork posited artmaking as incidental to being, with art functioning as just another way to archive life, instead of as its organizing principle.

Emily’s Sassy Lime (the palindrome is cleverly abbreviated as ESL) took center stage with a wide assortment of ephemera, documentation, and artwork that recounted the history of the band, including a listening station, a bookshelf, and individual vitrines dedicated to band members Emily Ryan, Amy Yao, and Wendy Yao. Instead of relying on first-person narration, the artists allowed objects—from a Calvin Klein poster and a TIME magazine covering the murder of Gianni Versace, to a tongue-in-cheek print of “IN RICE WE SURVIVE” and an elementary school award for “quietest in the classroom”—to convey everything from the cultural zeitgeist of the ’90s to how the teenagers felt navigating their Asian American identities. An oversized clamshell bed at the center of the gallery instantly situated the viewer in the familiar world of a teenage bedroom plastered with memorabilia, underlining how the teenage aesthetic of pastiche is fundamentally one of DIY. The practice of gathering images and objects, after all, is not just a means of self-expression; it is one of self-fashioning. The vitrines showcased how the teenage projected self is indistinguishable from the actual self, just as art objects were indistinguishable from non-art objects—where a simple idea for “the quintessential e.s.l. pin,” drawn by Emily Ryan in a letter to Wendy Yao, displayed in one case, later manifested as the band’s official pin, on view in a nearby case.

It’s no accident that the pin took form through correspondence, as an exchange of ideas between friends. These relational threads appeared throughout the Biennial, beginning with the members of ESL, who have known several of the exhibiting artists since their teenage days (Seth Bogart, Miranda July, Brontez Purnell, Deanna Templeton), worked with others later in their careers (Bogart, Purnell, and Stanya Kahn exhibited at 356 Mission Road, the artist-run space founded by Wendy Yao, Laura Owens, and Gavin Brown), and even influenced a new generation of teenage punk musicians (the Linda Lindas).

Each artist, in turn, brought with them another rabbit hole of connections. Bogart, for example, who was an early pen-pal of ESL, formed lasting friendships through writing letters and making zines—relationships that led him to play in bands with Purnell and later to mount his first exhibition at 356 Mission. On view were his ceramic renderings of publications and zines by figures like Purnell and Joey Terrill, their respective titles—Johnny Would You Love Me if My Dick Were Bigger and Homeboy Beautiful—painted tenderly by hand. The uneven, handmade surface of the ceramic served as a material embodiment of the exhibition’s ethos—an homage to the influences that shaped Bogart, even as he reshapes them in turn.

Not all the relationships throughout the show were directly connected to ESL or to a specific social scene; the Biennial drew attention to other forms of relationships as well, such as the familial bonds present in the works of Stanya Kahn and Griselda Rosales, both of whom collaborated with their children. The exhibition also recognized the often-overlooked relationship with the self, showing how one’s memory, emotion, and identity continually evolve over time. An immersive installation by Heesoo Kwon, for example, played with her family archive to reflect on the relationship between life and its narration. Childhood photographs were faded, enlarged, distorted, and—in one surprising lenticular version—altered to include an alien, standing behind what seems to be the artist’s mother. The images embody the uncanniness of memory, in which some details are not pictured, while others that may be insignificant or incidental are woven into a larger narrative, revealing how memory and history can become simultaneously more real and more fictional over time.

Another example included the bright pink gallery dedicated to the work of Deanna Templeton, which featured ephemera and journals collected from the artist’s adolescence. A teenage suicide note, which reads, “P.S. Can I please have a big funeral, with all my friends and stuff, and let everyone no [sic] it was a suicide, otherwise this dying was a waste,” paired with a polished presentation of the artist’s recent photographs, is a poignant reminder of how now-established artists were once just teenagers, too.

What resonated most powerfully throughout the exhibition was the framing of ephemera, doodles, documentation, and artwork with equal importance, emphasizing artistic practice as a process shaped as much by relationships as by time. By presenting artwork as the visual counterpart to the participating artists’ first-person accounts, Desperate, Scared, But Social drew upon ESL’s punk origins to approach the biennial like a zine: part collage, part oral history. The result reflected the DIY ethos of the riot grrrl movement, formed by the desire to tell its own story. As an early manifesto of Riot Grrrl proclaimed, “We’re tired of being written out—out of history, out of the ‘scene,’ out of our bodies. For this reason we have created our zine and scene.”² Here, the artists in Desperate, Scared, But Social similarly created their own scenes, filled with their own references and relationships, and with them, their own histories.

2025 California Biennial: Desperate, Scared, But Social (installation view) (2025). Image courtesy of the artists and UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art. Photo: Yubo Dong, ofstudio.

Caroline Ellen Liou is an art worker currently based in Los Angeles, US. She graduated with a BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MA in Art History from Courtauld Institute.

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