Lauren Tsai On Keeping Ideas Alive in a Dying World

When I visited “The Dying World”—Lauren Tsai’s installation along the periphery of Hollywood Forever Cemetery—I was struck by how Victorian it was. The yellow clapboard house appeared as morbid and anachronistic as any other mausoleum, anchored in a front yard brimming with mid-century detritus—rust-eaten bicycles, jettisoned turbines, mottled teddy bears, sun-bleached spring horses. A waifish, Burtonesque character—pale, with black hair, wide eyes and palpable anhedonia—lives in this house. She gazes out the window with a vacant expression, a bottle of ink in her hand. As she presses her palm to the windowpane, condensation fogs the glass. Her name is Astrid, and she has been haunting Tsai for a lifetime, an apparition or an idea lingering just this side of the spectral plane. Taken as such, “The Dying World” is a séance.

At the opening reception in November, a queue of influencers and celebrities—some of whom dressed in novelty wedding gowns fitted with tulle veils—posed merrily in front of the marquee that read, “THE DYING WORLD.” When I visited two weeks later, the exhibition’s traction had not waned, and indeed had extended into long, winding lines. This was not unexpected, as Tsai, who has more than a million followers on Instagram, has established herself as a figure in the international entertainment world. From being one of the most beloved characters on the Japanese reality show Terrace House: Aloha State to starring in FX’s Legion and Netflix’s Moxie! to making her directorial debut animating the “Cool About It” music video for Grammy Award-winning indie band, boygenius, the artist’s star is blinding, and she has the fanbase to prove it.

Tsai’s appeal comes as much from her beauty as her artistic tenor—her precocious sophistication, her mystic interiority. Over the past few years, she has embarked on a campaign to break into the international art and animation world with a distinct genre of pop Surrealism. Among her inspirations, she named Alice (1988), Hayao Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle (2005), Henry Selick’s Coraline (2009) and the oeuvre of the Brothers Quay. In her art, this affinity for the fantastical and the macabre shines through, as she spins out whimsical, willowy creatures that both shout and echo life. Trees and animals, humans and mountaintops share the same lifeblood in Tsai’s art, congealed together with serpentine intricacy. Her dreamy wraithwork appeared on limited-edition Nike Air Force 1s and Nike Air Maxes, on Marc Jacobs nylon bags and on the cover of a Marvel Comics West Coast Avengers issue. But “The Dying World” was perhaps Tsai’s most ambitious project, as within it, she communes with the themes, ideas and characters that accompanied her throughout her whirlwind rise to fame.

“I’ve always been very interested in the way that certain characters and certain things I’ve either encountered or created myself have shaped my own personality over time, and changed the way I view the world,” Tsai told Observer. “’The Dying World’ is themed around ideas existing as these sentient beings and having this place in which they live after we’ve forgotten them.”

In the Hollywood Forever Cemetery parking lot, just past the peninsular Sylvan Lake and the tombstone of Johnny Ramone, “The Dying World” rose amidst oblique silhouettes of palm trees and power lines. The exhibition had a strategic stage presence: The house was numbered 94 because Tsai was born in 1994. It was a humble, New England-style home because Tsai lived in Massachusetts before moving to Hawaii. It sat on a square tract of AstroTurf, which terminated abruptly a yard or two out from either side because Tsai wanted “The Dying World” to feel like an ephemeral stage set between this world and the next. Tsai explained that she was intentional with every aspect of “The Dying World,” right down to its location, of which she stressed the “liminality.” 

But as for Astrid, she is not Tsai’s to dictate, but rather to register, to mythologize. To Tsai, the character has a degree of agency—and by some measures, authority—within “The Dying World.” She is an almost chimeric figure of memory and mortality, entitled to her own methodology and course of evolution separate from Tsai’s.

Upon entering the house, visitors were welcomed into Astrid’s world by way of her childhood bedroom. It was pristine, prim and pale yellow, with everything seeming both undisturbed and dissonant. Astrid’s body sat upright on the edge of her bed, holding a lily of the valley sprig in her hand, with her disembodied head resting on her pillow. The window above her bed—presumably the one she’s seen pining out of—opened onto a charcoal illustration of diminishing phases of Astrid’s spindly figure bounding onto a pasture toward a distant house. Her desk was tidy, occupied by a bottle of ink, a pencil, a pocket-sized dollhouse and a small stuffed crow. There was a television set stacked with VHS tapes and a nightstand topped with a shaded lamp. On the fourth wall, a projection of the 4-minute The Dying World Part One: Forgetting stop-motion short film played on a loop.

In the film, Astrid wrestles with the inevitability of forgetting. She sits behind a computer at an office desk. Facing a vast, unforgiving white screen, she types, “There is an idea that no one wants.” She pauses, hesitates and adds, “it waits …” to the ledger. The narrative is mercurial, flitting between visions of past, present and a murky phantasmagoria. Astrid is first transported to her childhood bedroom, and from there, into the Dying World, a landscape littered with a variety of forgotten ephemera. Astrid finds herself on an island in this sea of refuse, accompanied by her abandoned idea and personal psychopomp, Crow, a ghastly beast with oil-slick feathers and spidery appendages. She feeds Crow a bottle of ink, and they wait together while sitting on a dilapidated swing set. Astrid returns to her computer screen, and she finishes the sentence: “It waits to be remembered.” At this stage, Astrid has an idea, but she’s running out of time.

“The relationship between Astrid and Crow is a transactional one,” Tsai explained. “The relationship a person has to an idea is transactional. I was very interested in exploring the consequences we have from committing to an idea, yet at the same time, the transcendence we can find when we actually realize one to its fullest, share that idea with others and give it a life beyond ourselves.” She deemed the process behind “The Dying World” as “anti-efficient,” describing the beauty in sculpting every minuscule facial expression, in sourcing doll-sized Dying World props one by one, in making Crow’s feathers and Astrid’s hair lift with the breeze. She found camaraderie with her team, as they created six seconds of animation ten days at a time.

To produce The Dying World Part One: Forgetting, Tsai tapped Nick Cinelli of Studio Linguini, a stop-motion and hybrid animation film studio based out of Los Angeles and London. The Astrid puppet was designed in collaboration with ARCH Model Studios, the studio responsible for the puppets used in classic stop-motion films such as Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox and Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride. Jim Williams scored the project, and Ines Adriana developed the sound design. In every sequence, every frame, every flicker of movement, the film honored the Dying World and the sentient ideas it represents, as if each detail were an altar.

The rooms in the exhibition—arrayed in vitrines of concept art, sketchbooks, oil paintings, sets, puppets and prototypes—served less as a preservation of the production technique and more as the artifacts of an idea, a memory, a fantastic belief. Each was imbued with a special soundscape designed by Adriana—shifting papers, footsteps on carpeted floors, disparate noises of nature. “I had to add more layers to the story,” Tsai explained, “to make it feel just as much a presentation as a process.”

As guests funneled out of the vestibule of the exhibition, a projection of Astrid on a glass panel appeared to cordon off the opposite ends of the house. She emerged pensive and pacing, her hand resting on her chin, as though deliberating on whether to remember or forget. “I’m more interested in the integration of fantasy into reality and into memory,” Tsai mused, “and creating something that includes this [fantasy world] as well as a foundation and a grounding point for it.”

In “The Dying World,” everything has a particular provenance and a special consequence, the didactics of which come directly from Tsai. She maintains a protective and clandestine relationship with her ideas and their interpretations, parceling out details in a steady, deliberate manner. When asked about the symbolism of Astrid’s accoutrements, such as the lily of the valley or the bottle of ink, revealing primarily that while they are significant, they—and the exhibition as a whole—only skim the surface of what “The Dying World” will eventually be.

“There is a magic to keeping things secret,” Tsai concluded, “For me, everything has to have a romance to it. And being able to romanticize the death of an idea or the death of the self is definitely always in the back of my mind as I’m creating things. I think it’s quite inextricable from my work at this point.”