Yeni Mao: Innumerable fires

The artist’s process sits at the intersection of various historical and scientific references, as well as rational and meditative states, an encounter between the industrial and the artisanal, the machine and the hand. Making different worlds converge also translates onto the collapse of time, creating a kind of future past that redeploys elements from tribal traditions and countercultures to articulate a flexible and ever-changing configuration of identities. Yeni Mao’s works and installations pursue the creation of his own material and discursive present, far from the hegemonic narratives that tend to dominate our lives and bodies. Both his condition of cultural and territorial displacement, as well as his dispossession of heteronormativity, have forced and encouraged the artist to pursue a type of self-construction that explores his own history and current place in the world. The artist’s idea of identity and culture is not formed through nationalist impositions and the territories demarcated by the State, but rather by a collection of experiences, social interactions and decisions carried out by desire. The references to specific cultures in Mao’s practice –including narratives and events from China and Mexico, indigenous traditions, obscure queer history, and many others– appear filtered by atypical readings and mechanisms of encounter. His work then, can be read as the production of microhistories that in turn negotiate and complete the larger History. Invention is thus presented as an alternative to the reconstruction of culture and History in Yeni Mao’s works, where he introduces elements from different origins within a dialogue of controlled disruption.

The ambiguity of categorization is taken as a condition in the work of Mao, where it is proposed that our relationships with others always constitutes a risk due to difference, but they also produce a coming together and the possibility of intimacy. Yeni Mao proposes relocating the category of home and world towards a language of the present, which is desirably contaminated and plural, thus promoting a real problematization of context.

Text by Laura Orozco

Photography by Ramiro Chaves @chavesdocs