Yeni Mao

Yeni Mao (b. 1971 in Guelph, Canada) received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and subsequently trained in foundry work in California and in the architectural industries of New York. In 2016 Mao relocated to Mexico City, where he currently lives and works. Yeni Mao’s work has been featured in numerous international exhibitions.

Mao is a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant 2021, and his work is part of Colección Jumex and the Kadist Foundation. His practice has been written about in Art in America, The New York Times, Time Out New York, The Advocate and The Village Voice.

The sculptural practice of Yeni Mao engages with issues of fragmentation through equations of body and architecture. Mao sets 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 negative space, on 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 construction systems, Mao emphasises 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 on 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-contextualisation, exploding the construction into components, Yeni Mao links our own personal cultural fusion and displacement with the way we construct our environment.