Conversation Series Fall 2025 Sofa Issues
Spirit as a Portal: Death, Ghosts, and Hauntings as a Door to Other Realms of Possibility
Nina Vichayapai with Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander
“When you think about family and your place in the world, you also think about death and dying… My thought was that if visitors meditated on the finitude of their own existence, it would lead to living a more meaningful life.”
When I recently visited the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle to see Spirit House, the timing could not have been better. I had just returned from a trip back to my birth country of Thailand. While there I had begun to feel as though I were being haunted. The feeling took hold in sudden moments. Moments like when Thai words I thought I had lost came together on my tongue with ease. Or when I immediately and accurately identified smells I hadn’t encountered for several years. As bizarre as it sounds, I felt as though I were somehow being haunted by a “more Thai” version of myself.
The sudden lapse in my usual spiritual ambivalence primed me well to find resonance with the themes of Spirit House. Within the company of the exhibition’s 33 artists of Asian descent exploring the boundary between life and death, I found the language to describe the haunting I had been experiencing.
Curated by Dr. Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander, Spirit House was initially exhibited at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford in 2024. The show’s themes are deeply personal to Aleesa’s own background in which a significant part of her youth was spent living in Thailand. There, the separation between the living and the dead are blurry. Aleesa was inspired by this casual acceptance of ghosts as entities to coexist with and respect. Aleesa’s curation explores the importance of hauntings in all their forms ranging from the ordinary to the monumental. War, migration, political revolution, break ups, loss of language, and moving homes, represents just a selection of subjects that the Spirit House artists reanimate as ghosts in need of tending to through their work.
Nina: I just want to start off by saying that I really relate to a lot of your background experiences that you shared in the Spirit House catalog. I was also born in Thailand and have also struggled with sleep paralysis. You say that you’ve always had these experiences with hauntings in your life that have influenced you. I’m curious if you could talk about what some of those early experiences were?
Aleesa: The concept of the show being called Spirit House is directly tied to my earliest memories of engaging with Thai spirit houses when I was a child. Having been born there and spending a lot of my early life there, my family would go back and forth between British Columbia and Bangkok. I thought of spirit houses as magical portals that invite you to consider other realms, people who have passed on, and the spirits that live in the space around you. So for me, it was a very natural part of everyday life. My family would tell ghost stories, and it was not something that people scoffed at. The supernatural or the otherworldly was just a part of everyday life. When I moved here to the States, I found that the Western-centric point of view does not take those world views very seriously.
Nina: That’s interesting because I did initially go into Spirit House feeling like I wouldn’t resonate with the show’s themes so much since I don’t consider myself to be very spiritual. But when I was there it really made me think a lot about how this version of spirit that was being explored could relate to my immigration experience. It felt like you were presenting this expansive version of spirit. I’m curious if that was an intentional choice?
Aleesa: Oh yeah. I mean, I wanted it to be a very expansive interpretation of what we could describe as the spiritual realm. I think everybody has a different relationship to some version of spirituality. The degree varies with each person. But the show really came from many conversations I had with artists about their thoughts on intergenerational inheritance, trauma, joy, and collective memory. Then there’s the sadness, the gaps, and the narrative loss that come with migration. And for some of them, being second-generation and not knowing their mother tongue.
It all comes together in this bittersweet way. All those things haunt a lot of people in ways both agood and bad, and also just relatively neutral. So I wanted to think about it in terms of the things that people bring with them when they migrate, the memories attached to those things, the new ones they create, and how they make sense of finding themselves and their families in a new environment home. When you think about family and your place in the world, you also think about death and dying. Spirit House was also informed by a somewhat Buddhist perspective. When I was living in Thailand from eight to 11, Buddhist culture was a very big part of our lives. My thought was that if visitors meditated on the finitude of their own existence, it would lead to living a more meaningful life. Which is a pretty straightforward form of Buddhist philosophy focused on mindfulness. But also, depending on who you talk to here, many people prefer not to have direct conversations about life, death, or passing on.
Nina: That is really powerful. I feel like it’s just so different from the way we think about spirituality in the West and under a Christian colonial context. In the show there’s such an openness and curiosity to the different versions of spiritual relationships that are out there. But it was interesting for me to read that some of the artists don’t believe in ghosts. And many of them are coming from different backgrounds that are informing their approach to the theme. What was the process like in working with the artists? Was choosing the work for the show a collaborative process at all?
Aleesa: Yes. I was able to speak to almost every artist in the show, with the exception of Do Ho Suh and the late Dinh Q. LeWith everyone else, I have some kind of nice relationship with them and had been doing studio visits for many years in preparation for the show.
Some artists’ work really informed the conceptualization of the project. Like the photographer Jarod Lew and his body of work about his mother from his series In Between You and Your Shadow, which is about his mother’s relationship to Vincent Chin [a Chinese American man who was murdered by two white autoworkers]. It’s such a powerful series and really encapsulates a lot of what I was trying to explore with the project
I’ve also been slowly collecting towards the show. About a third of the works in the show are from the Cantor’s collection. I had acquired them thinking that eventually those pieces would be in this show. In other cases, I would do a studio visit with an artist, and after I had done enough to really feel like I wanted to build a checklist, I would go back to some of them to say, “I would love for you to be in the show.”
We would then have a conversation, and they might have another work that they thought was a better fit.. In certain cases, some of the artists made new works for the show. Heesoo Kwon made the only commission in the show. But she’s based in the Bay Area, so I knew that it would be easy to collaborate with her on that. Stephanie H. Shih, Cathy Lu, and Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya, all made new works because they felt inspired by the theme. I was really flattered by that. Having new works created by artists who felt compelled to make them truly enriched the show.
I always endeavor to be as collaborative as I can, especially with living artists. I just think that it makes for a more meaningful and interesting project for everybody.
Nina: What has it been like for you to see the show travel from the Cantor to the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle?
Aleesa: It’s nice to be reminded that it’s still having an impact out there in the world. It initially opened over a year ago at the Cantor. I’m looking forward to going back and seeing it again in October, and to celebrating with artists, many of whom have become very close friends and important people in my life. I put every last bit of myself into that project. But what I got out of it was even more than that. I’m really pleased to hear from visitors of the Henry exhibition, including yourself, who have reached out about the show. It’s great to know visitors are having meaningful encounters there and learning about artists who will eventually become important to them.
Nina: That’s amazing. Well I’ve certainly been very moved by the work I saw and it was incredible to learn about so many artists who are new to me. I’d love to know if there’s ways you like to learn about or keep up to date with contemporary Asian artists?
Aleesa: Well at this stage in my career, I’m lucky enough, depending on how you look at it, that I receive constant emails from different galleries, artists, colleagues, and arts organizations. People know what Marci and I are doing, so they send things our way to check out. Or a gallery will reach out and ask if I will do a studio visit with an artist. I also look at biennials too, like Prospect New Orleans or the Whitney Biennial. Of course, that means I’m being sent artists at a particular stage in their career. And I don’t want to be institutional or hierarchical in that way. So, I also look at social media, like Instagram, to see who ends up just coming through on my feed.
I also do a lot of studio visits. I’ve done so many in L.A., the Bay Area, New York, and virtually. I love doing studio visits in new places I visit as well.
Nina: And could you tell me more about the Asian American Art Initiative that you organize as well?
Aleesa: The Asian American Art Initiative is the project that I co-direct at Stanford. It was co-founded by me and art history professor Marci Kwon. I started at the Cantor in 2018, and we’ve been doing it since then. We’re focused on building a preeminent collection of work by Asian American artists, among other things. I collect work that ranges from historical to contemporary. We also enjoy supporting emerging or early-career artists when possible, especially when we’re potentially the first museum to acquire their work. That can make a significant difference in their future. When I started at the Cantor, we had like 30-something objects by Asian American artists out of our collection of 41,000. And now we have something like 800 or more.
We’ve done more than ten shows related to the initiative here at the Cantor. Marci teaches courses out of my exhibitions as well.
Nina: That sounds like such an undertaking to sort of have to go back into history and sort of fill the gaps.
Aleesa: It’s fun. I like being able to do both. I like not being confined to either historical or contemporary work.
Nina: That does sound fun. I’m curious if you could talk about your time in the Pacific Northwest and what that was like for you? It was cool to learn that you had studied at Willamette University and spent a lot of time here.
Aleesa: I lived in Oregon from when I was around 12 years old to when I was 24, which is when I left for graduate school. I lived in Salem for all those years and went to Willamette University. I mean, you know, everything in life has its high points and low points. The best part of going to Willamette was that even though it’s a small liberal arts college, it has its own university art museum. So I got my first museum job working there. That is when I realized that working in museums was what I wanted to do. And specifically at a university art museum. So that’s really where I got my start.
I have great relationships with the people who are still in Salem, and I had one very beloved art history professor whom I kept in touch with until he passed away a couple of years ago. He’s one of the people I dedicated the Spirit House catalog to.
Since Oregon is predominantly white and was my first real home in the United States, I assumed the entire country was similar to Oregon. I wasn’t aware that things could be different. It was very common for me to be the only Asian American/person of color in a room. And since I’m mixed race, it’s complicated in a different way, as I am not always perceived as a person of color. That’s a separate conversation.. But I didn’t learn about any Asian American artists at Willamette. I didn’t even think to really look for it. Maybe that’s my own lack of imagination, but I think if you never see something, you don’t even think to look for it.
It wasn’t until I left that I realized that it could be different. There are places in the United States that are more diverse. I did an internship at the Art Institute of Chicago after I graduated, and it was amazing to finally be in a big city. During the last year of my PhD program, I lived in New York City. It was such a relief to finally feel like I had fulfilled that high school dream of living in such a vibrant art scene, where so many things are happening and there’s much more diversity. That was so revitalizing for me.
Living here in the Bay Area, of the things I love most about it is that it feels extremely Asian American. It’s just a part of life. It’s the food that everybody eats. Asian Americans have been here for a very long time. San Francisco was one of the most important historic ports and has the oldest Chinatown in North America. Many of my colleagues are Asian American. So we have Asian American curators, people who work in galleries, and people who work in the arts. I’m not the only one, and I love that so much. It’s part of the reason why I do the work that I do here. So it’s wildly different than when I was in Oregon. That really changed me, knowing that it could be different. But it did take leaving.
Nina: Thanks for sharing that. That’s all very relatable to me. I also had no idea it could be different until I left the Pacific Northwest for the Bay Area when I went to college. The experience of being in non-predominantly white spaces was so somatically different then what I was used to.
I’m curious about what you just shared about how working at the museum at Willamette University led you to want to work in more university museums. What is it about university museums that you like over other kinds of museums or art spaces?
Aleesa: Well, being able to support myself by working in an art museum while I was in college had a profound impact on my life. I love working with students because many don’t even understand that museums are an option in the world if you’re interested in art.
As far as the type of work I do, I feel like university art museums are allowed to do more experimental projects. Projects that have a more distinct point of view and are more critical of American or institutional history. All of the things that this current administration is trying to suppress.
The Cantor, for example, doesn’t charge admission. And that impacts the work that you do as a curator. Because at many other museums they’re concerned with revenue and ticket sales. You have to make sure the projects you do bring in droves of people. I, of course, want people to see my shows, but I think what’s more important is the impact an exhibition can have on specific individuals. And that can’t always be reflected in the number of people who come and visit the show. We make art accessible and take chances that other larger museums might have a harder time doing.
Nina: I definitely love that university museums are free. It provides so much access for people.
Aleesa: I want people to be able to just come to the Cantor even if it’s just for a few minutes. Take a break, chill, and look at something, without the commitment of spending $35 to enter a museum and feeling like you really have to stay and get everything out of it. $35 is a big entry fee. And you’re going to want to feel like you really got everything out of your visit that you could. So it kind of forces you to have a particular way of engaging with art. And I want people to have many different ways and approaches to engaging with art.
Nina: Definitely. The art museum kind of becomes a theme park at that point where you feel like you really need to get the most out of it.
Well I really just have one question left for you. Do you have a favorite ghost or ghost story?
Aleesa: Oh yeah, I was very traumatized as a child by a story of a particular ghost in many Southeast Asian cultures. Her name in Thai is Phi Krasue. The ghost is basically the floating head of a woman attached only to her viscera. She floats around and I believe she eats livestock, rotten food, whatever she can find. She would be in Thai soap operas that I would watch growing up and was the scariest thing that I could fathom. I was very afraid of horror films and ghosts growing up. Now, I love horror films. I think horror as a genre can be such a great form of subversive critique or an expression of culture.
So, I grew up being afraid of something–scary movies–that ended up becoming something that I really love as an adult. I think that’s a good way of moving through the world with the things that we are afraid of. There’s a reason for it. If you figure it out and you confront it, then maybe there’s something there for you.
Nina: Yeah, I love that. That’s a really great way to look at it. The second you started talking about Krasue I could just see it in my mind. So many movies with her. I feel like there is just something about the ghosts in Thai and Asian cultures in general. Like, they’re so scary!
Aleesa: Truly! There’s just something amazing about that, too. That they’re willing to go there. I’m also interested in horror that doesn’t rely on Christian theology and philosophy. I want different source points beyond that. So that’s also why I love Asian horror.
Nina: Yeah, it’s definitely cathartic for the culture it seems. They are willing to go there for sure. Well, thank you so much. I really, really appreciate being able to chat with you.
Dr. Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander (she/her/hers) is the Robert M. and Ruth L. Halperin Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art and Co-Director of the Asian American Art Initiative at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University. At the Cantor, she is the curator of Spirit House (2024), Livien Yin: Thirsty (2024), East of the Pacific: Making Histories of Asian American Art (2022), and The Faces of Ruth Asawa (2022 – ongoing).
https://www.instagram.com/aleesapalexander
Nina Vichayapai (she/her) makes art that explores what it means to be at the intersections of margins and peripheries. Her interdisciplinary practice includes anything from soft sculpture, public art, pie making, dog petting, and eavesdropping. She was born in Bangkok, Thailand and lives in Portland, Oregon.