Yeni Mao Canada, 1971

The sculptural practice of Yeni Mao engages in issues of fragmentation through equations of body and architecture. Mao pits the physical and psychological properties of restraint, domination and order against the chaos of the visceral human condition. The works are cyborg constructions.They play with architectonic suggestiveness, placing importance on the negative space, the absence, through a circumstantial framework. Various components and visual languages- expressions of craft, material building systems and modes of display- provide a sounding board of information.

Working with the agency of materials, objects and building systems, Mao emphasizes the tension between both their embedded and perceived significance. In an ongoing dialogue with the significance of material production history, the alteration of those materials becomes a medium for language or narrative. Mao layers his own personal histories over the expansiveness of these concerns, most recently the projects are based in family mythologies. He consistently references his surroundings, drawing from the colonial amalgamation of processes and materials and their relationship with contemporary object production. Through fragmentation and de-contextualization, exploding the construction into components, Yeni Mao links our own personal cultural fusion and displacement with the way we construct our environment.

Yeni Mao (b. 1971, CAN) was born in Guelph, Canada, and spent his developmental years in the United States, Sweden and Taiwan. He received a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and subsequently trained in foundry work in California, and the architectural industries of New York. In 2016, Mao relocated to Mexico City.