“Anida Yoeu Ali: The Buddhist Bug” opens in L.A. and makes the cover of the Los Angeles Times

Senior Artist-in-Residence opened her solo exhibition “Anida Yoeu Ali: The Buddhist Bug” at the Vincent Price Art Museum in Los Angeles. Curated by Steve Wong and Sonia Mak, the exhibition is the largest showing of Ali’s award-winning project and will be on view for nine months from Sept. 26-May 22, 2027. Ali will be doing a live performance of The Buddhist Bug at the exhibition’s closing.

“The Buddhist Bug” is an expansive performance project that brings together myth, humor, spiritual inquiry, and the lived experience of displacement. At its center is a monumental saffron-colored creature, nearly 328 feet in length, with a human face tightly framed in cloth at one end and a pair of feet at the other. Activated through performance, photography, and video, The Buddhist Bug moves through markets, temples, streets, rural landscapes, and other social spaces across Cambodia. The work reflects Ali’s complex relationship to Cambodia, diasporic memory, and transnational belonging. Its brilliant orange evokes Buddhist monks’ robes, while the cloth surrounding the Bug’s female face recalls the hijab and points to the Cham Muslim community, an ethnic and religious minority in Cambodia to which Ali and her family belong.

Press coverage of Ali’s solo exhibition also made the cover of the entertainment section of the Los Angeles Times.