Seattle 2024

After the Pacific Bonsai Museum, we made our way to Capitol Hill for lunch with Jeff's cousin. After lunch, we went to the Seattle Asian Art Museum at Volunteer Park.

We hadn't done any research on the exhibitions at the museum. Entering the museum, we started walking through galleries featuring mostly Buddhist artwork and statues. To us, these exhibits weren't anything out of the ordinary. After viewing a few such galleries, we turned around a corner and what came next surprised and delighted us.

The special exhibit was titled Hybrid Skin, Mythical Presence, and it featured performance artist Anida Yoeu Ali, a Cambodian born Muslim woman known for her performance art as the Red Chador. As the Red Chador, Ms. Ali walked around Seattle, Washington DC, Honolulu, Paris, Hong Kong, and Palestine dressed head to toe in a striking red sequined chador. Some of these performances happened soon after Trump was elected, so she walked around carrying signs such as "Ban Me", and "Nasty Woman". In Paris, she executed one baguette every hour until her demands - which included bringing her flags of every country France colonized - were met.

In 2018, Ali's chador mysteriously disappeared while she was in transit from Palestine to Israel. She held a funeral ceremony for it and retired it. But, in 2019, she resurrected the Red Chador in Honolulu, accompanied by six other performers in sequined chadors of varying colors. Undoubtedly, my favorite performance was of her and her compatriots walking around Honolulu (Waikiki and Kakaako to be exact).

As if The Red Chador wasn't enough, in the next room was an exhibit of another alter ego of hers called the Buddhist Bug. In this series, she dons an 100 meter long costume in a shade of orange similar to what monks wear. In the exhibit was her bug costume, along with photos of her posing in that costume in various settings around her native Cambodia. This was a fun exhibit and I really enjoyed the humor. I especially loved seeing bare feet - presumably belonging to a second person - protruding from the end of the long costume.

After the art museum, we walked over to visit Bruce Lee's grave as Jeff was interested in seeing it, and then we looked for the Pac Man Park where we filmed Jeff pretending to be a Pac Man ghost. After that, we made our way to the airport.Read more