Amanda Ba’s latest work confronts the global economy of desire

I met with Amanda Ba on Zoom a few days after the opening of her solo show, Developing Desire. The show explores China’s cultural consciousness, while interrogating the ways it is formed and perpetuated, opened on Sept. 7 during New York’s jam-packed art weekend, Armory Show. Ba has finally found a bit of “me time” while moving into her new apartment in north Brooklyn, where she has also been dealing with an unexpected battle: mice. As she points to a humane trap on the floor, it’s hard to tell what’s moving faster, the rodents or her skyrocketing career, the latter of which has just landed her work on the cover of Art in America. Yet Ba, fresh off being featured in the nation’s biggest art magazine, seems unfazed.

Born in 1998 in Columbus, Ohio, Ba spent her first five years in Hefei, China with her grandparents before moving back to Ohio and later graduating from Columbia University with a degree in visual arts and art history. Despite her youthful rise in the art world, Ba is a meticulous researcher, spending years on fieldwork, literature, and theory before she even picks up a paintbrush. She’s always considered herself a “research-based artist,” using concepts like libidinal economies—a framework that links desire to capital—to explore China’s internal policies and its global influence in her latest show. 

"I’m interested in how desire is harnessed within our economies, like how the desire to own a home in China has become essential to love, marriage, and ego," Ba tells JoySauce.

In her current show, on view at Jeffrey Deitch New York till Oct. 26, Ba invites viewers into a world where fantasies—both China's and the world's—collide. This show marks a shift in her work. Rather than reflecting on diasporic memories like her past work, Ba delves into China's current identity and its place on the global stage. Her three-channel video, More Future Triptych (2024), shot in her childhood hometown of Hefei post-COVID, blends real and staged scenes of daily life, examining China's historical obsessions and desires. The voiceover, delivered by Ba’s father, provocatively asks, “China’s fantasy of the world. The world’s fantasy of China. What does it mean to desire the world? Can what is given be refused?”

Ba returned to China post pandemic in summer of 2023 after a four-year absence, and was struck by the transformation. "Every time I visit, it feels like a new place," she says. But this trip wasn’t about nostalgia. For the first time, Ba approached China not just as a granddaughter visiting family, but as an artist and researcher dissecting the socio-political landscape. "There’s a growing belief that China has reached a global power level comparable to America’s. People aren’t as impressed by the West anymore," she says. Her work reflects the tension between that pride and the contradictions of rapid development, particularly in her hometown, Hefei.

"There’s a growing belief that China has reached a global power level comparable to America’s. People aren’t as impressed by the West anymore."

Ba's critique centers on the "economies of desire"—the ways in which China’s internal development and global ambitions are driven by an endless cycle of yearning. One of her video’s central themes is the sprawling real estate market, where homes are often sold before they’re even built. “Desire is frustrated,” the voiceover narrates, “Instead of finding a panacea, it has created a self-fulfilling prophecy.” The haunting footage of urban sprawl evokes a sense of both opportunity and despair, a metaphor for China’s meteoric rise.

The centerpiece of the exhibition, “Heart Wall” (2024), is a 16-panel installation dominating the gallery. With billboard-sized portraits of young workers, athletes, and students, the piece blends socialist realism with pop aesthetics. On the back, wheat-pasted calligraphy evokes Dazibao, the handwritten “big character posters” from the Cultural Revolution, used to voice protests or introduce ideas into public discourse. "I’m appropriating Dazibao’s form," Ba explains. "I’m taking the historical structure and replacing the content with translated excerpts from my video." This blending of past and present is a recurring motif in Ba’s work.

One standout piece in the exhibition is “Manifesto Room” (2024), in which two naked figures walk in opposite directions, in front of a wall of text. The text is an excerpt from former Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, Mao Zedong’s The Little Red Book. Formally titled Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, the book is a collection of statements from Mao’s speeches and writings, published between 1964 and 1979, and widely circulated during the Cultural Revolution.

"I bought an original copy (of The Little Red Book) from 1967 when I was in China, and it’s interesting because the art section on arts and culture is brief, mostly offering platitudes like 'there’s no way to separate art from the classes,' a sentiment that would still resonate today,” says Ba. “It also mentions that the government should promote all forms of art without favoring one style over another, which feels ironic given how things have evolved today. There’s nothing in that section explicitly banning any particular content or style, which I found surprising, especially when socialist realism became a primary driver of political movements."

Ba’s paintings push these themes even further, with goddess-like figures dominating the urban landscapes of China’s overdeveloped cities. In “River Titan” (2024), a massive nude woman floats in Shanghai’s Huangpu River, her body as vast as the Shanghai skyline that surrounds her. The scene is as surreal as it is charged, blending eroticism with environmental commentary. “By making them large and somewhat grotesque, I aim to challenge the notion of beauty as something inherently sexual. Instead, these figures embody power and affirmation,” Ba says, describing her departure from traditional beauty standards.

What makes Ba's work so compelling is her refusal to let the viewer sit comfortably. She avoids overused Western tropes about China—population control, censorship, and political dictatorship—in favor of deeper questions about China's aspirations and complicity in global power dynamics. “There’s this idea that China is just dragged along by Western imperialism, but China has its own desires and power. It’s complicit in its own ideology," Ba says.

Ba’s work forces us to confront uncomfortable truths about the global economy of desire, a country’s rapid urbanization, and the myths that both the East and West construct about each other. As Ba continues to forge her path in the art world, her work serves as both a mirror and a window into a world where construction and destruction, desire and power, are forever intertwined.