{"id":19820,"date":"2026-01-05T18:34:04","date_gmt":"2026-01-05T18:34:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2026\/01\/05\/interview-lauren-tsai-on-keeping-ideas-alive-in-a-dying-world\/"},"modified":"2026-01-05T18:34:18","modified_gmt":"2026-01-05T18:34:18","slug":"interview-lauren-tsai-on-keeping-ideas-alive-in-a-dying-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2026\/01\/05\/interview-lauren-tsai-on-keeping-ideas-alive-in-a-dying-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Interview: Lauren Tsai On Keeping Ideas Alive in a Dying World"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\u201cThe Dying World World\u201d was a liminal space where forgotten ideas live on in the iconic Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Photographed by Joshua White. Courtesy of artist.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

When I visited \u201cThe Dying World\u201d\u2014Lauren Tsai<\/a>\u2019s installation along the periphery of Hollywood Forever Cemetery\u2014I 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\u2014rust-eaten bicycles, jettisoned turbines, mottled teddy bears, sun-bleached spring horses. A waifish, Burtonesque character\u2014pale, with black hair, wide eyes and palpable anhedonia\u2014lives 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, \u201cThe Dying World\u201d is a s\u00e9ance.<\/p>\n

\n<\/section>\n

At the opening reception in November, a queue of influencers and celebrities\u2014some of whom dressed in novelty wedding gowns fitted with tulle veils\u2014posed merrily in front of the marquee that read, \u201cTHE DYING WORLD.\u201d When I visited two weeks later, the exhibition\u2019s 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<\/i> to starring in FX\u2019s Legion<\/i> and Netflix\u2019s Moxie!<\/i> to making her directorial debut animating the \u201cCool About It\u201d music video for Grammy Award-winning indie band, boygenius, the artist\u2019s star is blinding, and she has the fanbase to prove it.<\/p>\n

Tsai\u2019s appeal comes as much from her beauty as her artistic tenor\u2014her 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<\/i> (1988), Hayao Miyazaki<\/a>\u2019s Howl\u2019s Moving Castle<\/i> (2005), Henry Selick<\/a>\u2019s Coraline<\/i> (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\u2019s 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<\/i> issue. But \u201cThe Dying World\u201d was perhaps Tsai\u2019s most ambitious project, as within it, she communes with the themes, ideas and characters that accompanied her throughout her whirlwind rise to fame.<\/p>\n

\"Young\"Young
Lauren Tsai with puppets and set dressing from The Dying World<\/em> short film. Photographed by Daria Kobayashi Ritch.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve always been very interested in the way that certain characters and certain things I\u2019ve either encountered or created myself have shaped my own personality over time, and changed the way I view the world,\u201d Tsai told Observer. \u201c\u2019The Dying World\u2019 is themed around ideas existing as these sentient beings and having this place in which they live after we\u2019ve forgotten them.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the Hollywood Forever Cemetery parking lot, just past the peninsular Sylvan Lake and the tombstone of Johnny Ramone, \u201cThe Dying World\u201d 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 \u201cThe Dying World\u201d to feel like an ephemeral stage set between this world and the next. Tsai explained that she was intentional with every aspect of \u201cThe Dying World,\u201d right down to its location, of which she stressed the \u201climinality.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

But as for Astrid, she is not Tsai\u2019s to dictate, but rather to register, to mythologize. To Tsai, the character has a degree of agency\u2014and by some measures, authority\u2014within \u201cThe Dying World.\u201d She is an almost chimeric figure of memory and mortality, entitled to her own methodology and course of evolution separate from Tsai\u2019s.<\/p>\n

Upon entering the house, visitors were welcomed into Astrid\u2019s world by way of her childhood bedroom. It was pristine, prim and pale yellow, with everything seeming both undisturbed and dissonant. Astrid\u2019s 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\u2014presumably the one she\u2019s seen pining out of\u2014opened onto a charcoal illustration of diminishing phases of Astrid\u2019s 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<\/i><\/a> stop-motion short film played on a loop.<\/p>\n

\"Pale\"Pale
In the exhibition, Tsai distorted the spatial and material domain of her ideas, sizing up and scaling down the atmospheric environments of Astrid\u2019s world. Photographed by Joshua White. Courtesy of artist.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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, \u201cThere is an idea that no one wants.\u201d She pauses, hesitates and adds, \u201cit waits \u2026\u201d 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: \u201cIt waits to be remembered.\u201d At this stage, Astrid has an idea, but she\u2019s running out of time.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe relationship between Astrid and Crow is a transactional one,\u201d Tsai explained. \u201cThe 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.\u201d She deemed the process behind \u201cThe Dying World\u201d as \u201canti-efficient,\u201d describing the beauty in sculpting every minuscule facial expression, in sourcing doll-sized Dying World props one by one, in making Crow\u2019s feathers and Astrid\u2019s hair lift with the breeze. She found camaraderie with her team, as they created six seconds of animation ten days at a time.<\/p>\n

\"In\"In
In the first room of \u201cThe Dying World,\u201d visitors engage directly with Astrid\u2019s spectral and discursive world while watching her ascent into the Dying World. Photographed by Joshua White. Courtesy of artist.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

To produce The Dying World Part One: Forgetting<\/i>, Tsai tapped Nick Cinelli<\/a> 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<\/a>\u2019s Fantastic Mr. Fox<\/i> and Tim Burton<\/a>\u2019s Corpse Bride<\/i>. Jim Williams<\/a> scored the project, and Ines Adriana<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

The rooms in the exhibition\u2014arrayed in vitrines of concept art, sketchbooks, oil paintings, sets, puppets and prototypes\u2014served 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\u2014shifting papers, footsteps on carpeted floors, disparate noises of nature. \u201cI had to add more layers to the story,\u201d Tsai explained, \u201cto make it feel just as much a presentation as a process.\u201d<\/p>\n

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. \u201cI\u2019m more interested in the integration of fantasy into reality and into memory,\u201d Tsai mused, \u201cand creating something that includes this [fantasy world] as well as a foundation and a grounding point for it.\u201d<\/p>\n

In \u201cThe Dying World,\u201d 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\u2019s accoutrements, such as the lily of the valley or the bottle of ink, revealing primarily that while they are significant, they\u2014and the exhibition as a whole\u2014only skim the surface of what \u201cThe Dying World\u201d will eventually be.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is a magic to keeping things secret,\u201d Tsai concluded, \u201cFor 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\u2019m creating things. I think it\u2019s quite inextricable from my work at this point.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"In\"In
Tsai acknowledges that, as an idea that accumulated over the course of her childhood into her adulthood, Astrid and her Dying World remain pivotal in her artistic practice. Photographed by Daria Kobayashi Ritch. Courtesy of artist.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\t\t\t\t\"Lauren<\/p><\/div>\n