The Only Cambodian Goth in Connecticut: Alienqueen's Psychedelic Skeletons

When Alienqueen was fourteen, her parents drove out of town for groceries and left her home alone. Her hair was long and black. By the time they got back, she'd shaved half of it clean off.

"They were just like, what? What has happened to our kid?"

She laughs telling it. She laughs a lot, often right after something that isn't funny, and apologizes for rambling. "I'm very introverted," she says, "so it's hard." Then she keeps going.

Her parents had come a very long way to watch her do that to her hair.

Asked whether she always knew she'd be an artist, she said yes, since about three. She drew people and skeletons, "like, obsessively." Then she added something almost in passing. "I don't know if many people know this, but I'm a Cambodian refugee." A beat later: "Sorry, that's kind of heavy."

Her parents survived the Killing Fields. When they fled, her mother was six months pregnant, crossing the jungle toward Thailand on foot with two hired guides. Thieves worked that route, robbing and killing refugees, and they kept German shepherds.

The dogs found her mother. "She was face-to-face with the dogs, and they didn't even bark," Alienqueen says. They ran off and barked at other people, who didn't survive. Her parents believe the dogs let them live because of the baby. (Her own pug barked through half our call. She loves dogs.)

"I'm born year of the dog," she says, "which is even crazier."

She was born in a refugee camp in Thailand. At about a year old, a church sponsored the family to Connecticut. "Out of all places, couldn't be more opposite than Cambodia."

She wasn't a citizen until seventeen. "I literally was an alien," she says. "And I liked it." The name folds that together with her old PlayStation handle, AlienQueen_666, and the xenomorph queen from Aliens. "Alienqueen is much cooler."

The town had one mall and a graduating class of about 110, and she was pretty much the only Asian kid in it. She had maybe two friends, "and that was good enough," and she filled the rest with cartoons. Beavis and Butt-Head "religiously," Daria, Ren & Stimpy, and her favorite, King of the Hill. "I felt like I could relate."

By middle school she'd found the skaters. Her first board was a Hook-Ups deck, anime girls all over it, and she can see it in her drawings now. Nirvana, Marilyn Manson, Hot Topic, JNCOs. Everyone else wore Abercrombie.

Her mother tried, buying Abercrombie and Mariah Carey CDs. "I was like, no, I want that Green Day CD." Alienqueen packed her real clothes in a backpack and changed once she left.

Boredom did the rest. "Am I allowed to talk about drugs on this?" she asked, then answered herself. Weed, acid by fifteen, and bottles of Robitussin. "Everything was, like, in slow motion." That last one was a first for this series.

Then, as punishment, her mother threw out her paintings.

"I just remember looking out of my window and seeing the garbage truck with all these canvases stuffed in the trash bin," she says. "My heart actually broke."

It wasn't a one-way war. Her mother had danced in the Cambodian Royal Ballet before the country collapsed, and in Connecticut she started a troupe with other refugees that performed at universities. From seven to fourteen, Alienqueen danced with them. "It was like a balance."

Her parents told her everything, and she thinks that's how they carried it. She never saw them break down.

"As a kid, you don't know how to talk about it," she says, "so you just draw it."

Her father told her to have gratitude, because "we're gonna die someday." Her mother told her about the father she never saw again. When Alienqueen was thirteen, the school called home to say her drawings were disturbing. Her mother said she'd always been creative like this.

She still draws skeletons constantly. "We're skeletons underneath it all. It has no gender." A skeleton can stand in for anyone, so she reaches for it when a piece is about all of us.

"Nothing in life is certain, but death is certain," she says, "and that's the meaning of all of my artwork."

For years it kept her distant. "I just never wanted to be close to anyone." What changed it was watching her parents, who had lost their entire families, and seeing "their hope and their strength." "I feel at peace with it now."

Her piece called Death is the Grim Reaper covered in smiley faces, "because maybe death isn't as bad or scary or sad as it seems."

The bright colors come from the same place. "My mom was going to the movie theater, and then a genocide happens," she says. "You never know, so you have to live."

The road was long. Art school in Florida for computer animation, the only woman in a class of eighty-nine. Serious games at the University of Central Florida, one built to keep Vietnam veterans from relapsing. A cosmetology license and years doing hair to pay for supplies. New York, "expensive as fuck." In New York and Chicago she sold abstract paintings for apartments and offices, because nobody bought illustration. "Not many people know this at all," she says. "I always just wanted to be an illustrator."

When on-chain art arrived, she posted the drawings she'd made since she was a teenager. "Everything about my childhood now is just elevated."

Asked to describe the work, she landed on her standard answer, "Lisa Frank on acid," then flipped it back. "How would you describe my art?" I told her that was cheating.

The palette really is Lisa Frank, plus the smiley faces and alien heads of a '90s childhood. The melting is the acid. "I remember tripping on LSD, and I was like, whoa, I understand the '60s and flower power," she says, describing flowers so bright they came at her. On one trip, skeletons hung out with her, "and I wasn't even scared."

Every girl she draws is her. "They are me, but they represent a feeling." Anxiety is a girl with a snake wrapped around her "until, like, her limbs are about to pop off." "I turn emotions into characters."

She works in Procreate on an iPad, from about nine at night until two in the morning, with scary YouTube rabbit holes running in the background. "I have massive ADHD." There's no plan, just a feeling she keeps adding to. Asked how she knows a piece is finished, she laughs. "Maybe they're not even done, done yet."

Asked what else we should cover, she hesitated, then went for it. "I believe in ghosts. I think that I'm psychic."

Her grandmother was a medium in the Cambodian community in Long Beach. At eight, Alienqueen watched a séance, her grandmother's voice changing and her eyes rolling back white. Afterward her grandmother remembered none of it. "I thought it was just normal."

At twenty-one, a skeptic, she let friends drag her to a Vietnamese medium in Orlando. "It's just like a horoscope," she remembers thinking. The first thing he said was, "You have the sixth sense. You didn't come here to ask about business or life or health. You really came here to ask me if you are psychic." She had. Afterward her mother explained the family line, back to a great-grandfather who made a glowing box float with his mind.

In Cuba in 2017, a Santeria priest said nearly the same words as she walked in. "You have the sixth sense, and you're just like me."

She started praying every day, and the dreams came. A virus released as biological warfare. War in the Middle East. A lab making human and pig hybrids. She wrote them all down, and she still has the dated journal.

Smaller ones keep happening. She dreamed she'd meet Amare Stoudemire, though she doesn't watch basketball, and three months later photographed him holding her French bulldog. In 2022 she hoped for a Gucci collaboration, and then Zach from SuperRare called with one. She hoped for Sotheby's and got it. "Maybe everyone's psychic," she says.

Next is Paris. User Offline, her new series, shows at Asia Now from October 19 to 24, as physical one-of-one prints only. It's full of PlayStations and Game Boys and Walkmans, about "the last decade before we all became tech," and about the simulation she's pretty sure we're in. Asked who's running it, she has a theory. "Like when we're playing The Sims."

A Clockwork Orange, her favorite movie.

God of War, "the best video game series ever."

And Angkor Wat, in Cambodia, one of the world's great temples.