The sculptural practice of Yeni Mao engages in issues of fragmentation through a series of assemblages and architectonic arrangements. Mao evokes and examines a sense of otherness, with the concurrent sensations of restraint, domination and order. His works are coded with references to subcultures, countercultures and outsiders; enforced or self imposed on account of their social, racial, sexual, or transnational status. Mao sees deviance as the basis for his multivalent practice. Often layering these larger concerns over his own personal histories and social positioning, most recently the projects are based in family mythologies.
Playing with the condition of suggestion, Mao places importance on the negative space, the absences, through a circumstantial framework. Equating the anatomy of the body and building systems, he suggests the fabrication and dismantlement of our surroundings is also a reconsideration of ourselves. Mao frequently places allusions to mythological animals in these suggestive environments, “…posit[ing] the possibility that knowledge can be found, or made, in the ungoverned experiencing of our bodies, inside and out.” *
In a manner of material fetishisation, the works imply abstracted, unravelled bodies; cyborg constructions of found, fabricated, or sculpted components. Predominately using steel, ceramic, and leather as raw materials, Mao constructs the works himself, citing the act of making and the transformation of materials as a vehicle to both content and form.
*Gaby Cepeda, Art in America, April 2022
