By Bela Chauhan
Titled Desperate, Scared, But Social, OCMA’s 2025 Biennial exhibition sets out to center the emotional, cultural, and inherently political richness of late adolescence—specifically through the lens of teenage girlhood and the many that connect to it. There is a concrete intention within the rhetoric of the exhibition that hinges importance on the idea of community cultivation being a priority in our globally tumultuous times, and that is explored through the networks branching off of Emily & Amy Yao, more specifically, their friends, influences, and mentors.
This year, OCMA deviates from the typical biennial format by spotlighting just over a dozen artists (plus two “exhibitions within the exhibition”), favoring depth over breadth. While this makes for a more focused curatorial structure, it unequivocally also raises questions about access, representation, and the distribution of institutional resources. Does this approach foster genuine community-building, or risk reinforcing exclusive circles within institutional spaces? How might alternative curatorial models better balance depth with inclusivity, and in what ways is this selection actively shaping the narrative of adolescence and youth culture?
The fact that this exhibition is grounded in the legacy of an Asian American punk band is significant, and the inclusion of youth curators and collaborative installation practices speaks to a desire to make the process feel more intimate and collective cross-generationally. Desperate, Scared, But Social uses adolescence as a lens through which to connect everyone- those who have been through it and those who have yet to, inviting dialogue about the complex ways youth culture continues to influence and reflect our collective future. The exhibition feels like a love letter to a very specific kind of girlhood: zine culture, punk bands, Asian American feminism, and DIY activism. But it begs the question: what do we do when the subculture we reference has already been archived, absorbed into institutions, and taught in Gender Studies 101? When does invoking girlhood become less about resistance and more about framing an already commercialized aesthetic as resistance?
Amy and Emily Lao’s impact on the 1990s punk scene—and on intersectional Asian American feminist punk specifically—is undeniable. As young women carving space in a predominantly white, male-dominated scene, Emily’s Sassy Lime’s work challenged norms and opened doors for future generations. The exhibition’s focus on their early work and influence highlights an important chapter in underground culture that shaped creative communities across California and beyond. But there were moments where the conceptual framing stretched thin—where the connection between 1990s riot grrrl DIY ethos and today’s political and cultural climate felt as though they grasped at each other from afar. Riot grrrl inarguably shaped generations of feminist artists, yet its invocation here to me begs for more risk taking when choosing the work surrounding it.
One of the Biennial’s most distinctive elements is the inclusion of the OCMA Young Curators program, which invites teens to organize an exhibition drawn from the museum’s collection. Their inclusion is a meaningful gesture, not only in giving younger voices visibility, but also in providing real institutional support. The installation, though at times reading a little too sleek (some texts veered into algorithmic perfection), shows that the curators were grappling with the relevant but also no longer as subversive as they once were ideas of nostalgia, social media, and pop culture myth-making. And while their choice to frame Britney Spears as a centerpiece of Y2K-era longing was a smart cultural marker, it felt like Gen Z nostalgia for a past they never lived—a kind of capitalistic algorithmic appeal that flattens time into aesthetic and commodity.
There’s a curious dissonance at the heart of the show: the teens look backward, while the older artists look forward. Within this canyon of past and future I find myself wishing I saw more from the present. Artists making work that speaks about the atrocities happening today. One such work that I loved was the series of painting-works made in collaboration by Griselda Rosas and her son. She uses “decolonial strategies to examine the visual legacies of colonialism, cultural hybridity, and care/labor across the U.S.–Mexico border.” With iterative collaboration on the monsters her son draws, she stitches her own perspective, exploring this shared experience of familial and shared trauma. The monstrous shifts between a visual fantasy and the very real, systemic forces rooted in colonialism that threaten safety, family, and belonging; the side to what these systems evoke that often goes ignored by those creating them.
The Juvenalia section features early works by now-established artists, including a standout from a queer Chicano artist, Joey Terrill, who reimagines Los Angeles through a world-building lens shaped by queer and Chicanx futurism. These works felt urgent, authentically raw, and speculative—a sharp contrast to the younger curators’ yearning for a polished, processed past.
Punk was born as a disruption: raw, chaotic, and fiercely outside the establishment. By centering on an aestheticized teenage girl punk, this show smooths that edge into something safe and Instagrammable. Sure, giving adolescents a platform is important—especially when the future feels uncertain—but here, it feels more a niche homage than a collective movement. Pasting ‘rebellion’ neatly onto the museum’s walls in large, blown up prints, merchandise, shelves meticulously decorated: it’s punk as brand, punk as teenage girl bedroom, not punk as resistance. And in a world that desperately needs real upheaval, that feels like a missed opportunity.
At its best, this exhibition is less about a singular sweeping thesis and more about creating individual space—for byproducts of thought experimentation, for nostalgia, for designed futures. Some of the thematic connections feel loose, and not every inclusion lands with the same impact. But the exhibition is asking a bigger, riskier question than most biennials: what would it mean to center care, collaboration, and long-term investment in individual artists, rather than just offering temporary exposure? In this way, OCMA’s biennial feels like an act of institutional imagination. More than that, it offers a visual language to put one in a state of reflecting on their past selves—for revisiting the discomfort, the willingness to question, and the rebellious energy we often associate with adolescence. In a time when disinformation runs rampant and political power hinges on keeping people uneducated and uncritical—when a president can proudly admit he “loves the poorly educated”—that rebellious clarity feels not just nostalgic, but necessary to embody through a contemporary version of onesself. Maybe being a teenager isn’t really about age at all. Maybe it’s a level of honesty with ourselves we forget to have sometimes. In that sense, this show invites all of us to tap into a form that contains the refusal to accept things as they are. To imagine what collective resistance could look like if we stayed hungry for truth and unafraid. Desperate, Scared, But Social pieces together irreplaceable communities of Los Angeles in a fragmented & abstract collage of adolescence. It’s not perfect, but maybe that’s exactly the point- it isn’t about having it all figured out—it’s about the entropy in the work of becoming.
