Amanda Ba, For Sport (2025)11 Images
Amanda Ba has her own way with figures. The 27-year-old painter combines personal memory with psychosexual fantasy, depicting figures that challenge a predominantly white Western canon of figural painting. Last fall, Ba filled her first solo exhibition in New York – Developing Desire at Jeffrey Deitch – with gargantuan figures in the midst of Chinese cityscapes and demolitions. These larger-than-life figures have become something Ba is known for, thus far in her (still early) career. But that’s exactly not what you should expect at her latest show, For Sport, at Micki Meng SF, on show from May 22 to June 27. Instead, these figures are impossibly muscular, but entirely in perspective with their environments.
Born in Columbus, Ohio, Ba spent the first five years of her life with her grandparents in Hefei, China. In her work, she doesn’t aim to solely celebrate her cultural identity, but to interrogate its formation, working closely with queer and post-colonial theory. In For Sport, this looks like examining the role of sports in the formation of personal and national identities. The athletes in the paintings are dog hunters, weightlifters, synchronised swimmers, skiers, basketball players, and boxers.
Ahead, we spoke with Ba before the exhibition’s opening about last year’s Olympics, the politics of sports culture, and the new tools in her arsenal.
Why did you want to explore personal and national identity through sports?
Amanda Ba: The exhibition is titled For Sport, as in doing things for the sake of sport. That title came to me pretty easily because the show is dealing with sports imagery, but the angle I’m coming from is looking at sports as a proponent of the formation of personal and national identity. America is super into sports and has an extremely diverse sports culture. So, what does it mean for your individual personality to be a sports fan? Your hometown attaches you to a sports team.
Then, on a national or global level, modern sports are largely a Western post-colonial project, and so the introduction of certain Western sports into colonial places ended up having great effects on the sports culture of those places. In contemporary times, all soft power because sports are supposed to be an entertainment activity for people to consume and participate in. You’re supposed to keep politics out of it, right? But sports tend to be a reflection of what’s happening in global politics. For example, in the past decade, America and China have been battling it out at every Olympics for a medal count.
How did all of those themes influence your technical approach to the works?
Amanda Ba: The show is intended to have a critical edge, despite having a visual language that’s more graphic and approachable in terms of style, with flatter, brighter colours, to go along with the sports theme. So I did have to make sure the show wasn’t purely celebratory of sports. I didn’t want it to be indistinguishable from socialist realist sports propaganda. As for how I did that, it was mostly a vibe. And what I mean by that is choosing specific moments to insert symbols or graphics, trying to imbue the paintings with a critical tone. Complex images have something sort of strange and off-kilter about them that sets them apart from what would normally be a gorgeous sports photography shoot. Like when photographers go to the Olympics, and they just capture a beautiful moment. So I tried to use moments in motion, using tone, composition, and style to pull them away from a really celebratory vibe.
Sports tend to be a reflection of what’s happening in global politics. For example, in the past decade, America and China have been battling it out at every Olympics for a medal count – Amanda Ba
You mention the Olympics. Was it last year’s Olympics when the idea for this exhibition came to you?
Amanda Ba: Last year, I was finishing up my New York show and watching the Paris Olympics. I wasn’t religiously watching it, but the Olympics is something that you’d have to make a point to ignore. It’s such a big event. It’s the only time these more obscure sports get any media traction at all. Very few people are sitting down to watch their local rhythmic gymnastics competition. So there are all these obscure sports, and then each time the Olympics rolls around, there is also an opportunity for the Olympic committee to add a new sport.
Last year, in Paris, there were certain points that fascinated me, like the opening ceremony. I found myself thinking, ‘It’s your country’s time to flex, so why were they bringing in Celine Dion and Lady Gaga?’ It was weird. I thought, doesn’t France have their own celebrities that they are proud of? It’s such a nationalistic display of soft power, and it’s so easy, for me even, to be influenced by judgments of those moments and project them onto a view of the entire nation. It made me think of the Beijing 2008 Olympics and China’s soft power debut as a zeitgeist moment on the global stage. It was before all of these videos of super futuristic Chinese cities on TikTok, so, at the time, the public opinion of China was that it was a developing nation.
Your last show was set in China. Was there a specific country or location you imagined when painting the works in For Sport?
Amanda Ba: I really wasn’t thinking of setting them anywhere specific. A lot of them are in standardised indoor arenas. The figures still take after my likeness, so they are Asian figures, but based on the colours of their uniforms, you don’t necessarily attribute them to having any distinct flag or country. I was making these decisions about the scope I’m intending to reach in my show because, when I address a big umbrella theme, I don’t want to throw in a bunch of random elements without being careful about it. If I were to paint these Asian figures with graphics and logos from certain countries in East Asia, then it would become a comment on East Asia, which is a different conceptual tangent. I didn’t want to be hyper-specific about any geographic location and throw off the balance of the show.
Did keeping it vague and unidentifiable make it more difficult?
Amanda Ba: There was a moment for my weight lifting painting where the reference stock photo I found online had the USA logo on it, and the graphic design was really cool. I was about to paint it, but then I realised it would have just been about literally, USA power. I thought about it for a long time and ended up changing the text to ‘BIO’. It’s a little vaguer and is obviously about biological strength, but it could also sound like the name of a sports brand. I’m also alluding to Foucault’s idea of biopower and biopolitics; the way that governments control the population through monitoring and control of the body itself.
[The Olympics] is such a nationalistic display of soft power, and it’s so easy, for me even, to be influenced by judgments of those moments and project them onto a view of the entire nation – Amanda Ba
What about the figures themselves? Why did you decide not to make them gigantic?
Amanda Ba: They’re not really giantesses this time. I have a web of ideas that I can deploy from my arsenal, and it’s still really malleable, but they have certain ideas attached to them. I started the giants thing when I was looking at queerness and monstrosity. That was fitting because giantesses have ties to titans and mythology. The idea of a giant woman is antithetical to a lot of stereotypes about East Asian women. With sports, there’s not so much overlap. Maybe on a subconscious level, there always will be, because it’s me painting them, but for this show, scale is realistic.
What other tools have you added to your arsenal in this exhibition, then?
Amanda Ba: It’s all new. This show is really different. There are graphic colours, the compositions are a little more risky, and things are rendered in a flatter way for a poster-like effect. Also, the textures of clothing. In my last show, the new textures were rubble and buildings. This show has all new textures of puffers, helmets, sweat, snow, and polyester-like uniforms. The figures are also impossibly muscular. They have an anatomy that is almost wrong and have muscles on top of muscles.
What do you think you’ll take with you into your next show?
Amanda Ba: Last night, I went to a talk where this painter I love, Janiva Ellis, said something I really agree with. It was about how, when you’re working on a show, you start to get ideas for things you want to do in the future. That’s if you’re not burnt out. You reach a point where you see the path for the show laid out before you and will execute the thing, but are already dreaming about the next thing. Right now, very loosely, I feel like I want to do a bunch of crazy multi-figural classical paintings. I don’t know why I wanna do this, maybe just because I haven’t yet.
For Sport is on show at Micki Meng SF until June 27.
