In a move that some have said harkens back to the culture wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s, a city official has pulled an artwork from an exhibition on the grounds that it is “obscene.” San Antonio City Attorney Andy Segovia made the decision to remove a video work by Oakland-based artist Xandra Ibarra from an exhibition of contemporary Chicanx art at the Centro de Artes, which is under the control San Antonio’s Department of Arts & Culture.

Hours before the show, titled “XicanX: New Visions,” opened on February 13, Segovia notified the art center that the work had to be removed for its “obscene content.” Ibarra’s piece, titled Spictacle II: La Tortillera (2014), was to appear in a black-box viewing space in the show alongside other artists’ work, and a description nearby it was also scrubbed of Ibarra’s name and any mention of her art.

Ibarra’s performances and artworks have appeared at numerous international venues, including the Broad museum in Los Angeles, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York, El Museo de Arte Contemporañeo in Bogotá, and ExTeresa Arte Actual in Mexico City. In August, she had a solo exhibition at the Knockdown Center in Queens.

In a letter sent to San Antonio’s mayor, Ron Nirenberg, the National Coalition Against Censorship expressed concern about the work’s removal “because of your apparent discomfort with its unconventional viewpoint on representations of sexuality and the challenge it presents to gender stereotypes.” The letter continues, “This act of censorship flies in the face of the city’s First Amendment obligations.”

Heji Shin’s exhibition at gaga & Reena Spaulings Los Angeles, “Angel Energy,” pushed deeper into the themes of birth, beauty, and celebrity that she explored in her controversial mural-size portraits of Kanye West in 2018 and her gorgeously gory 2016 photographs of crowning babies. In a series of five composited images, “Angel Energy 1–5” (all works 2019), Shin places photos of human infants at the digitally rendered breast of Jedy Vales—a computer-generated “brand ambassador” for the website YouPorn that has been designed as a compilation of users’ most searched-for traits. In Shin’s prints, she appears in several different guises, all white-presenting: in one, she has a long magenta ponytail and ice-blue eyes; in another, watery green irises and a perfectly bald head. There are even slight variations in her nipples. Vales is, in other words, a malleable fantasy of a narrow kind, representing a statistical mean of desirability. The babies are an ironic addition, turning her into a packaged brand of womanhood.

Shin correlates the crowdsourced porn star with another kind of body built for mass consumption, that of the Influencer—and more specifically, the Kardashians. Interspersed among the “Angel Energy” prints were staged photos of Kardashian impersonators, pouting and staring in a generic, bleach-white loft. In one, Thank You for All the Love, a Kim look-alike is shown breastfeeding while on the phone. Almost all the Kardashian women are mothers, but here it’s their images that have spawned.

In the exhibition, the “Kardashians” duck-lipping in their underwear were actors, but the uncomfortable fact is that Shin has access to the real ones. To make another series of works on view, Shin peeled apart Polaroids of the actual Kardashians that she took while photographing them for CR Fashion Book, and printed the ruined film on polished metal panels, titling each print with the first name of its subject. The results recall the formal distortion of Warhol’s bespoke celebrity silkscreens: one shows a high-contrast image of Kris Jenner—Kardashian matriarch—on the phone wearing sunglasses, the contours of her face and hands outlined in bright red; in another, a dark purplish abstraction is all that remains of Kylie, the youngest daughter. These authentic pictures are also, teasingly, the least legible in the show.

He-Ji Shin: Angel Energy 1, 2019, inkjet print, 38 by 28 inches; at gaga & Reena Spaulings Los Angeles.