And yet, Tao Lin does not want you to feel bad for him.

In 2006, the New York-based poet born to Taiwanese parents in Florida released his first collection of poetry, you are a little bit happier than i am (Action). His follow-up — the story-collection, Bed, and novel, Eeeee Eee Eeee, from Melville House — was the first double-book fiction debut since Ann Beattie released Distortions and Chilly Scenes of Winter simultaneously in 1976. His latest work is a poetry collection entitled Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, from Melville House on May 15.

In much of what he writes, Lin follows around twentysomething males much like himself who pine over girls they’ve lost or haven’t yet found, eat lonely meals in lonely apartments, stare blankly at computer screens, and lay quietly in bed, sobbing. Concurrently, his work finds bears that claw humans and knock over gumball machines and homeless hamsters that sell stolen merchandise.

Most of it is a little absurd, but all of it is routinely exposed. And it’s in the confines of wondering what it is that makes us happy, how we can form relationships to feel good about, and where we can find meaning in our lives that Lin has found his voice. In addition to being the poetry editor of online magazine 3:AM and the producer of his popular blog, Reader of Depressing Books, here is a guy who is crafting art by being completely honest and direct about disconnect, about loneliness, about the good and bad in all of us. And Lin wants you to know he feels happy about that.

Is being an Asian artist something you think about?

Tao Lin: No.

Why not?

TL: I don’t think about being “Asian” or being an “artist.” I don’t know. Because they’re abstractions I guess.

Does your heritage play a role in how you want to be perceived?

TL: No. I want to be perceived as “That is someone whose book I want to buy so he can get a ‘steady cash flow.’” And “That is someone who is the same as me; I would like to meet him and be his friend.”

So do you ever think about your writing as art? Do you ever set out to go somewhere with it or are you just writing?

TL: I think about everything as “art.” I have thought about the universe, and concluded some things. Those things make me want to view everything as “art.” I feel okay about this. Everything to me, maybe, is “art,” meaning there is no rhetoric that is not sarcastic, ever, in my life, currently.

Will this sarcastic rhetoric ever end, do you think? Will sarcasm, for you, stop being an emotion one day and you’ll look back on it as a phase?

TL: Probably. “Faith” or “complete ‘belief’ in something” seems to be more effective, as a tone, for one’s life, for being productive, and I seem to want to be productive, so maybe. But it just depends how “far” you want to view it. From another perspective it could be viewed that my rhetoric is “sarcastic rhetoric is ‘true’ rhetoric from the point of view of everything” or something, and that would be a non-sarcastic worldview. I think about myself and I change a little every few months and like a lot every few years, so I don’t know. Probably I will change.

I read a quote from you recently in which you said you think in terms of whether or not you’re productive. Does that still hold up today?

TL: Mostly it does, I think. I feel meaningless a lot of the time; there seems to be almost no other way to “judge” whether I “should” at any moment “feel good” or “feel bad.” I think, based on that, I’ve internalized that I should feel good if I have been productive and bad if I have not been productive. I like reading about things that make the universe seem meaningless and make me feel meaningless but I feel bad if I “match” that and just “lay around” all the time. I like making things that make me feel “new kinds” of meaninglessness. Maybe I’m productive at creating varieties of meaninglessness so I can “screw around” in meaninglessness and have fun with it or something.

If you were forced to get a real job — in a cubicle, I guess — would that make you feel more meaningless?

TL: No, probably not. I might feel less meaningless– I would be thinking about how to exploit my desk job to fund other things a lot of the time maybe. Actually I think I only feel meaningless sometimes. Most of the time I feel other things, sometimes I feel “nothing” or something. I know I feel meaningless sometimes because I’m on Gmail chat and I type to people, “I feel meaningless.” Most of the time I type, “I feel okay,” and it seems “true enough.”

Do you set out to be absurd or consciously wacky?

TL: No. I feel “completely honest” and “direct” about almost everything I’ve published in a book. It was hard to be “wacky” and “absurd” when I was spending almost every day alone in the library then walking home alone and laying on my bed feeling bad. I do try to make everything I write either “interesting” or “funny” in some way, but I don’t put that over being “direct” and “honest.” But it’s not “completely honest,” I guess, because “unfiltered” my thoughts would be like, “I feel bad. I feel bad. I feel bad. Bagels. Hummus. I want the burger at Counter (an organic vegetarian restaurant in Manhattan). Dirty choads. I feel dirty. I feel bad. Mansion.” That’s not even completely honest. A lot of the time I’m thinking really bad words consecutively in my head without any meaning or emotion. If I feel bad though I don’t want to just type, “I feel bad” partly because it would be “burdening” someone else with feelings of wanting to “help me.” I don’t want to make anyone have feelings of needing to help me or wanting to help me.

So what might make you feel better?

TL: I don’t know. I don’t think I feel any “worse” than anyone else. Or rather I don’t think that is a question I ever want to think about. I don’t like people trying to convince other people that they feel worse than them or have had a worse life or something. I think that means I want everyone to “live in the present” or something. I don’t feel “bad” overall I guess. I feel “something” or something. I think I can say for sure that some things will make me “feel good” in the short-term like eating something or getting a certain e-mail or something.

Miru Kim is nude. The New York-based artist and art consultant is 27 years old this year but looks much younger, like she’d be the ideal insider for Wired‘s Asian Schoolgirl Watch. But such a generalization would discredit Kim, whose artistic interests and photographic output are far from ordinary. Sometimes really far. Sometimes way out at places like the now demolished Revere sugar factory in Red Hook, Brooklyn, where Kim has disrobed and climbed atop a rusted, deconstructed basin, her naked backside balancing over its edge. With a camera across the room on a 20-second timer, she captures the moment on film. In her 2006 art project, Naked City Spleen, she captures it in prose: “Roaming around naked in this haven was a marvelous experience, because I felt so natural and liberated. I had momentarily become one with the sprouting nature that had engulfed the decaying man-made structures.”

The exposed flesh isn’t just what makes Naked City Spleen so impossible to forget. There’s nothing pornographic here, nothing exploitative. The project — which can be seen on Kim’s website — is focused on anatomy; the structure of the city finds the form of the human body. In many of the images, the artist appears as a ghost, a delicate shadow that may not be there at all. In others, she’s a different kind of vision, one with angular bangs and butterscotch skin. Kim’s insertion of a living thing in a ruined world is what makes her work so imaginative. If she were clothed, it wouldn’t work. They’d simply be photos of decay, not images of life. We might even be prompted to suggest, “Why is the photographer in the frame?”

“Images of my body in the photographs appear to impersonate the condition of freedom,” Kim writes at the end of Naked City Spleen, “which is intrinsic to all sentient living beings.”

Raised in Seoul, South Korea, the artist has recently established herself in New York as a provocative new voice. Aside from using Spleen as the catalyst for a new film and performance project this year, Kim founded Naked City Arts, a not-for-profit organization in downtown Manhattan that helps other young artists establish themselves before they can acquire gallery commissions. Kim was also featured in Esquire’s 2007 Best & Brightest issue.

Is Greater Than: Is being an Asian artist something you think about? Does your heritage play a role in how you want to be perceived?

Miru Kim: Not really. I don’t really think about being Asian at all. I mean, there might be a little bit of that. There might be little influences of Eastern religion in my work. That might have something to do with how I am perceived, like it looking religious or something. Buddhist, maybe. I’m not a Buddhist, but people might think that. I grew up learning a lot about Buddhism and Taoism. I grew up with that so those things might come out.

IGT: Are you still shooting yourself?

MK: I’m not shooting myself a lot. Not so much anymore. If it’s a location that’s really hard to get to, I will just take pictures of myself. Recently I was in the sewer in, um, London. And that was really hard to get into. I took a lot of pictures of myself there. I mean, it was a rare opportunity. I had to do it. But I’m pretty much done with the series now, the series of photos. I mean, I don’t want to say I’m done done, but it is pretty much complete and I want to start working on other things.

IGT: What kinds of things?

MK: I just finished a film. It’s a film about the photos and the series. So I am in the process now of editing it and submitting it to film festivals and things like that. But there are lots of other projects I want to be doing. I am working on a performance project right now too. There are other people, there is another person working on it with me. It’s a collaborative project, I mean. I’m doing a play and we want to perform it in one of the spaces. It might be in one of the spaces where I shot some photos or at least in a similar sort of location. The project is starting soon.

I also want to do more collage work and more painting work. I went to school for painting. But I will always be coming back to photography. I don’t ever think of myself as a photographer, but it’s one of the medias I use and I’ll always come back to it.

IGT: How has New York’s decay changed your view of the city?

MK: I love New York more because of the decomposition. It gives it more character and more dimension. Yeah, I like it more. I mean, if the entire city looked like it does in some parts [laughs], if the whole city was dilapidated, then I probably wouldn’t enjoy it. I’d probably hate it.

IGT: Where are you going with your art? Do you think about that?

MK: I don’t know. I’m going with the flow right now. [Laughs.] We’ll see what happens, you know. [Laughs.] Actually, one of the reasons I started doing what I’m doing, one of the reasons I started the series, was because I wanted to go on adventures. I like adventures.

But I’m not really an urban explorer. I think it would be unfair to call myself an urban explorer. I don’t do it so much. I have friends who go out and explore much more than I do and really get into the scene and everything.

IGT: So where are you at right now?

MK: I’m actually at Petco right now. [Laughs.] I’m buying rat food. I have two pet rats at home. Actually that’s one of the reasons I started doing this, the series and everything. I like rats. I actually don’t see them that often though. I don’t see them in the subway tunnels that much or anything. I haven’t seen many. I see them more on the platforms.

Actually, one of the ways the series got started was because I was trying to take a picture of a rat on one of the platforms and then it started to go in the subway tunnel. So I just started following it. But then I found out that, um, the city doesn’t really want you to do that. They don’t like you to go in the tunnels. But then I come across some other people who were going into the tunnels all the time. So I started doing it again. And that’s how I kind of got into this whole thing. It was kind of on accident.