IN CONVERSATION: YENI MAO - My Framer Site

Illustrated portrait of Yeni Mao by Maria Chen, inspired by a photograph by StudioKJT

DATE

2024/01/04

ARTICLE

Maria Chen

PHOTOS

StudioKJT

In conversation with Chinese American contemporary artist, Yeni Mao.

Yeni Mao, born in 1971 in Canada, is a Chinese American sculptor residing in Mexico City. He earned a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and honed his skills in foundry work in California and the architectural industries of New York. Mao's sculptures, primarily using steel, ceramic, and leather, explore fragmentation through assemblages and architectonic arrangements. His works, featured in international exhibitions, include solo shows like "Yerba Mala" in Mexico City, “An array of disruptions and codependencies” in London, and "I desire the strength of nine tigers" in New York. Mao's practice delves into issues of otherness, using materials as a means of conveying content and form. His sculptures are layered with references to subcultures, countercultures, and outsiders, reflecting on social, racial, sexual, or transnational identities. Mao, a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant 2021, emphasises negative space and absences in his art, linking the anatomy of the body to building systems and prompting a reconsideration of ourselves in relation to our surroundings.

Ahead of his forthcoming representation at Frieze LA, he chats with us from his base in Mexico City, about his work, his upbringing, and his influences.

CREDITS

Header: An array of disruptions and codependencies

Slider 1: fig 39.6 juarez 88
nickel and brass-plated steel, leather
74 x 41 x 58cm

Slider 2: fig 39.1 freemartin
blackened steel, porcelain, ceramic with graphite finish, calcite, leather
64 x 122 x 79cm

Slider 3-4: Documentation, individual components of installation fig 33.1-5 yerba mala
Blackened and painted steel, glazed ceramic, cochineal on ceramic, gold and nickel-plated volcanic rock, brass, leather, horse hide, aluminum, chain, hardware
122 x 377 x 204 cm

CNTRFLD. Can you share more about your journey as an artist? It would be great to hear a little about your childhood, where you grew up, and how your upbringing may have influenced you to pursue becoming an artist. From your BFA at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago to your training in foundry work in California and the architectural industries of New York, how have these experiences influenced your sculptural practice?

YM. I find myself constantly circling back to aesthetics and concepts absorbed early in life. I was born in Canada, but we moved to Michigan when I was still a baby. Michigan is part of the rust belt of the United States, where American industry fell in the 70’s. The automobile market and manufacturing was "taken over” by Japanese companies, that’s why Vincent Chin was killed. Around the same time the Vietnam war was officially ending. So that’s’ the environment that my parents moved into. We lived in a college town, East Lansing, very international and at the same time conservative. Lots of punk shows and house parties and yelling “fuck the police”. Reagan and AIDS was happening. So all this before I was 17 created an intrinsic awareness of racial and capitalist hegemony. Around the time I graduated high school, Re/Search magazine came out with its Modern Primitives edition. I was very into industrial music culture, and these possibilities of transcendence beyond or through physicality, picked from indigenous knowledge. I think now, in retrospect, I rejected my physical self because of race and AIDS. Even though it was filtered through white guys basically, it opened a world I was reflected in, recognizing that it was possible to find alternative ways of being inside of a contemporary culture still driven by the industrial revolution and colonialism.

At SAIC I wanted to study sculpture, but was intimidated by the heavy-duty Dad energy in the basement sculpture department. The foundry was run by a woman, Carolyn Ottmers. As a queer Asian kid, this was my in. I mention this because these ideas of safe spaces and holding space is real, and it gets passed on, I would not have been able to start my career without that opportunity. After SAIC I didn’t want to continue for my MFA, so I went to San Francisco and worked in a foundry for a couple years. I moved to New York in 1996, all the time loving contemporary art and hating and not understanding the art world. To make ends meet I worked in fabrication, and fell in with a design-build architecture firm, young architects obsessed with the international style and Jean Prouvé. I worked in the shop, cutting and welding extrusions, building vocabularies. I was interested in ideas of utopia, especially in regards to immigration, and the post-minimalist attitude towards material and construction. Eventually I was able to quit and concentrate on my artistic practice, and in 2015 I relocated to Mexico City. All my current sculptures use steel as the base, I’m thinking through form by building an armature, an armature that can restrain, hold, exalt, hold together fragments. All these experiences place the objects that I make outside of sculpture, with the potential to stand as self-reflective, esoteric objects.

CNTRFLD. Your sculptures are frequently described as autobiographical, especially in relation to your transnational background. Could you discuss how personal histories, family mythologies, and social positioning inform your recent projects?

YM. This is a recent thing, it was during the pandemic that I really started to think about who and what we hold close, and what “ancestral“ really means. I had always felt that my access to my heritage was through self-made mythologies, that it was always a couple steps away from me, and filtered heavily though whatever means I was getting my info. That coupled with this instilled urge to be new and assimilate, a subtle, taught, rejection of my race. Maybe I didn’t feel like personal stories were valid enough, but I tried to respect that real change was through all of our personal accounts, not despite them, through dogma. The pandemic was a period of real reckoning for a lot of us, an intense exploration of interiority.

I did two projects that directly related to my family. “I desire the strength of nine tigers” at Fierman in NYC was based on interviews with my mother. Really I was using her as a medium to access my grandfather, who died young, I never met, and I am supposedly the most alike. It centered around the Japanese invasion of Malaysia during WWII, my mother was only 2 or 3 at the time. The Japanese invaded their village in Borneo, my family fled the village and lived with the indigenous Sea Dayak. Eventually they returned to the village. That’s the general gist, there are several parts that I still draw on. One in particular is the relocation of the school my grandfather ran during reconstruction, the center of the Chinese community. They disassembled the building bit by bit and rebuilt on another site. I think this story is so poetic, the dismantling and the re-construction, memory, bodies, architecture, home, movement, all very relevant things to us, now.

The second project was “Yerba Mala” at Campeche in Mexico City. I decided to approach my paternal side. The main installation was modular, pyramidal series of steel platforms intervened with ceramics, leather, and electro-plated volcanic rocks. My practice in general deals with equations between the body and architecture, a universal, human body. With “Yerba Mala” I started to think of our bodies and mythological creatures as one expression, that our condition is basically animal. I based the installation on the tattoo on my left arm, which I got not to remind me of my patriarchal heritage but how I am separate from it. The tattoo is a monument, on my skin, so I extracted aspects of it to make this fragmented fu-dog/qilin/dragon/ghost body. In the show I used several electro-plated volcanic rocks. In Mexico these are called “tezontle” and have a very specific cultural reference. I relate this rock to the pacific rim, the ring of fire. By nickel-plating them I am dragging this super primal material through a modern industrial process. The final object is difficult to place, spacey. Its becomes material that stretches temporally, touching on territory and alchemy.

CNTRFLD. Your practice often involves materials suggestive of cultural elements and non-Western traditions. How do these elements contribute to the domestic or industrial character of your sculptures, and how do they reflect your own cultural background?

YM. I am interested in transformation. In objects- in which I am including sculpture, day to day objects, buildings, railings, the sidewalk, etc.- I’m interested in how this final object is guided by who or what is doing the transforming. There are some things that have specific references but those really have to do with the agency of the objects, or how these things are seen- like the tezontle I mentioned before, it has a specific meaning depending on who’s looking at it, where it is, and what’s done to it. That said, there are very few specific cultural references, as you say, they are suggestive. My approach is more open than that. As far as how that reflects my own cultural background, I would say very strongly, as I am finding who I am and what I make becomes malleable in the world, and is, at its core, an amalgamation of both beliefs and inheritances. Because of the focus of this forum CNTRFLD, I would also say that this experience is in particular an Asian diasporic experience. That we are allies or enemies depending on the shifting gaze, and because our often pieced-together pasts, are vulnerable to inaccurate definitions. It’s like we are literally ghosts.

CNTRFLD. How do you perceive the impact and significance of Asians in the arts today, especially in terms of shaping and reflecting global culture? And how do you feel your own background contributes to this broader conversation?

YM. I can only answer this through my personal experience. One of the reasons I left the States was a lack of opportunity and community among the Asian diasporic artistic communities. There was a great fear of “ghettoizing” yourself, or a fear of nepotism, to pay attention to other Asians, between artists and also by the few Asian curators around. Also, there have been studies about how Asian and Latino artists need to be born in an Asian or Latin country to gain gallery representation. Since I have left, almost 8 years now, that has changed. I think it changed not only because it was due, but it was also pushed forward by the BLM movement, the Atlanta murders, and the rise of Asian hate during COVID. This to me is unimaginable, in the best way, to see how this has changed, I never thought I would see that day that Asian diasporic voices would be legitimized as has happened in the past few years. 47 Canal, Commonwealth and Council, Make Room, Micki Meng, Murmurs, Tina Kim, and lots of others are all presenting (some for quite some time) strong exhibitions of artists of Asian descent. And also, most importantly, in the company of other strong BIPOC and white voices. If institutions can follow suit, then perhaps our largely ignored participation in the new world can be recorded.

CNTRFLD. Could you share more about how your move to Mexico City has shaped you over the last 8 years? Do you see Mexico as a base for the foreseeable future, especially considering the positive changes you've noted in the recognition of Asian diasporic voices in recent years?

YM. I do see it as a base for the foreseeable future. I have always thought of Mexico as a permanent move. Even though yes I’m culturally very American, I wasn’t even born there, and when I thought about it in a larger scale, it’s minute in terms of the movement of my people, and the movement of people in general, a stop. So that’s maybe the first epiphany that shaped me, as you say. It is of course not without its challenges, and the conversation about gentrification and how to drop into another country responsibly is quite complicated. Maybe the second epiphany is that I could exist out of the tribal, racial binaries that is the states. Here I’ll always be a foreigner no matter what, and in some way that’s freeing, whereas in the states there is always this facade that you belong.

I would say the most important part about the move, that is really interwoven with two ideas above, is the understanding of the porosity of history and my place in it. That the history we learn about not only Asians, but all peoples in the new world, is defined by the current borders and the fabrication of nation states. The current US/Mexican border has only been around as it is for a 150yrs or so. For 400 years, Europeans shipped goods and labor from Asia through the Americas. The coolie system was a replacement for African slavery. There was a series of political walls over centuries that controlled the ebb and flow of our population. To reduce the history of Asians in The Americas to railroads and internment camps is an oversimplification. It’s an appreciation of just how vast the condition of “diasporic” is.

CREDITS

Divider: An array of disruptions and codependencies

CNTRFLD. Your work engages with materials such as steel, ceramic, and leather. How do you approach the selection of materials, and how does the act of making and transforming these materials contribute to the conceptual depth of your sculptures?

YM. I consider steel my main medium, as I’ve been working with it for decades at this point, so its very fluid for me. The ceramic, leather, and found objects came later, they became the entities that inhabit the architecture. I love ceramics as its the opposite of orthogonal thinking, its just mud that really only deals with the gut intelligence of the hand, without the mind. When I’m in the studio I try to push away all the cerebral static, and access the lizard-brain, open a channel through my hands and hope the object that spits out the end addresses all my more worldly concerns. It’s a narcissistic, meditative, spiritual way to access or break down any conceptual frameworks I have built for myself around sex, race, what have you.

CNTRFLD. The description of your work often mentions issues of fragmentation through assemblages. Could you elaborate on the significance of fragmentation in your sculptural practice and how it relates to the themes you explore?

YM. I work additively, as in assemblage, as opposed to subtractively, like carving. It has something to do with making an image, as opposed to looking at the materials and objects around and assembling them. The activation is through the combination of potentially disparate parts, developing an internal logic. It becomes almost an ontology. This is way of working is more in line with my conceptual framework, my world view. It sounds very existential but it’s quite basic, we are an aggregation of parts, maybe lost some pieces, some pieces not fitting right. This is what the works deal with, I’m not as interested in the illusion and invention of a whole, for now at least. I like this idea of incompleteness, that there are parts we don’t like or want to recognize, like animal urges and other driving forces perhaps not socially acceptable in whatever society you’re in.

I’ve used the “fig #” prefix in all my titles for the past decade or so. It leaves me free to explore disparate expressions, while keeping them under the umbrella of one investigation for which each work is in fact a fragment of the whole practice, not a complete, representative answer. In some way it preserves the freedom of abstraction, as a piece of a vase in an archaeological museum can provide some sort of information or clue in ever widening circles of knowledge- not only the rest of the vase, but to the room it sat in, who made it, in what region, in what empire or what have you. Now, we can think about how that vase fragment even got to the museum in the first place. This is the agency of an object. So if a fragment in a museum can hold all this, a fragment in one of my sculptures, or the sculpture itself, can also hold all this knowledge, history or myth doesn’t really matter, it’s as real as you want it to be.

When I was maybe 20, I went to a trannie bar (I know I might be cancelled for this but that’s what, unapologetically, the internal and external name was then). In my innocence and ignorance I muttered to my friend “is she real?” And next to me a tall gorgeous vision said to me “Baby, it’s as real as you want it to be”.

CNTRFLD. The importance of negative space and absences is mentioned in your work. How do you approach the incorporation of these elements, and what role do they play in the overall narrative of your sculptures?

YM. I like to think of these sculptures as having temporal movement, meaning that they are material in a state of transformation, mutable, shifting, coming together as they break apart. A corruption of a static state. Even though the sculptures are actually quite solid, they reference that they are objects with an origin, that they have been made, they don’t just spontaneously exist. With the industrial complex we look at objects now as if they just appeared in Ikea or on Amazon, without question of how they came to be.

I also think that these negative spaces in the work paradoxically provide some sort of opacity into the function of the object. I’m interested in this ambiguity of function, the sculptures act on recognition. It’s a strange object, some parts may seem familiar or entice a visceral reaction, like you should interact with it in some way, climb in it, ride it, whatever.

CNTRFLD. In your practice, deviance is mentioned as the basis for your multivalent approach. Could you elaborate on how notions of deviance influence your work and its engagement with social, racial, sexual, or transnational status?

YM. The concept of deviance in relation to my work is the suggestion that there is richness in ungoverned actions. This idea of deviance, being outside of a norm, has been an unchosen state of existence for me, a condition. I think this is a common experience. This state has filtered into how I’m thinking through the sculptures, that they enable a form of searching and growth because they are these undefinable objects, maybe you would have a embodied visceral reaction to them, or recognize some parts of it, a vague sensation or memory. So it’s an embracing and exploring alternate spiritualities as opposed to the church; alternate means of social and political existence, opposing the hegemony; alternate ways of having sex, engaging with physicality, and loving; alternate ways of thinking about personal and collective pasts and how that could guide a future.

CNTRFLD. Your recent solo exhibitions include "Yerba Mala" in Mexico City and “An array of disruptions and codependencies" in London, among others. How do you approach the curation and presentation of your work in different contexts, and how do these environments influence the viewer's experience?

YM. I always have in mind the architectural envelope of where I am showing, and like to engage the walls, floors, and ceiling, so the work creates a surrounding, a strategy of a lot of sacred architecture. I try to create an aesthetic entry to the work, into this room full of potentially confusing and weird esoteric objects. The sculptures function more like gestures, fragments, as we were speaking about before. So it’s a creation of a non-linear narrative that would start to block in more solid understandings of the work. I remember Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon approaching the narrative this way, blocking in different facets of the story gradually.

I eschew this idea that a sculpture, or object, or fragment holds meaning as a singularity. I am thinking of each exhibition as an assemblage, which is why I suppose a lot of the installations feel like clusters, where it’s hard to separate whether what is being presented is one work or several works. I think this is sometimes a challenge for my gallerists, it would be much easier if I showed a multiple of the same sort of object, with a straightforward equation of form and meaning, but to me the key is this non-linear narrative, poetics that by nature are difficult to put into direct literal terms.

fig 39.5 the body of the king is an illusory production machine glazed ceramic, nickel-plated steel, leather 212 x 55 x 48cm

fig 21.6 beat box nickel-plated steel, nickel-plated volcanic stone, aluminum 29 x 28 x 30cm

fig 39.5 the body of the king is an illusory production machine glazed ceramic, nickel-plated steel, leather 212 x 55 x 48cm

fig 39.5 the body of the king is an illusory production machine glazed ceramic, nickel-plated steel, leather 212 x 55 x 48cm

fig 39.5 the body of the king is an illusory production machine glazed ceramic, nickel-plated steel, leather 212 x 55 x 48cm

fig 39.1 coil nickel-plated steel, leather, hardware 145 x 46 x 43cm

fig 39.3 tether glazed ceramic, nickel-plated steel, leather, hardware 166 x 24 x 15cm

fig 39.7 strikebreaker bronze, nickel-plated steel 101 x 49 x 66cm

CNTRFLD. We are excited about your forthcoming representation at Frieze, LA. How are your preparations leading up to it, and can you share a little about what can we expect?

YM. At this point, at the time of this interview, the work is completed and shipping. I am beyond excited for this opportunity to re-enter the states on this platform. I’ll be presenting a new body of work, several floor sculptures, and a series of screen prints on wool felt. For the sculptures, I’ve used as a starting point scaled patterns of five basements that are part of a series of tunnels underneath the Mexican/U.S. border town of Mexicali. The Chinese and Chinese-Mexican population inhabited this tunnel system around the beginning of the 20th century, during the time of The Mexican Revolution and the exclusionary laws in the United States. The history is speculative and varies from source to source, when I did my research visit there, instead of a revealed narrative, I encountered an impenetrable history. So I wanted to respond to this opacity, thinking about transparency, liminal spaces, the physical body vs. the mythical body vs. the architectural body. The sculptures are built of steel armatures, the basement plans exploded and the forms extruded, intervened with organic gestures of ceramic, animal skin, and volcanic rock. They’re like cyborgs, the steel plates pulled apart revealing viscera and entrails.

CNTRFLD. Looking ahead, are there particular themes or directions you are excited to explore in your future projects? How do you envision the evolution of your practice in the coming years?

YM. I’ve avoided the image in my work, and want to be more specific in sculpted or drawn imagery, while at the same time letting the abstraction of the armatures and materials sing for themselves. A simultaneous definition and abstraction within one expression, pushing in opposite directions. Other than that I have no idea. Living as an artist is precarious and so much of the ability to develop a practice has to do with opportunity and practicalities, so my life and practice are constantly adjusting to the ebb and flow of interest in my work, me, and by who. I hope that my work can be seen without a piece of fetishist biographical data at the front. That there are a myriad of other investigations the work is doing. This is really what is meant by multivalent. I often wonder how the work would be seen if they were done by a white artist, or if I had a “home” country to represent. If the canon is (just now) accepting black abstractionists, and as Asian rights have always followed Black liberation in the new world, hopefully I will see that day as well.

CNTRFLD. Considering your unique journey and background, what advice would you give to someone from a similar cultural or transnational background who is aspiring to pursue a life as an artist?

YM. Don’t let your voice be swayed by outside forces.

30 January 2024 Mexico City

In conversation with Chinese American contemporary artist, Yeni Mao.

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