Mai Thai

I am an interdisciplinary artist working in sculpture, photography, installation, performance, drawing, and writing. Intensely repetitive, involved processes follow heavy conceptualization on themes of identity, particularly concerning gender, mental health, race/ethnicity, emotions, trauma, and chaos in my artwork. As a queer, nonbinary Vietnamese American artist, my primary concern is to subvert paradigmatically colonial, cisheteronormative power structures with candidly ambivalent and self-aware assertions of my marginalized experience. My personal narrative explores masculine, feminine, and androgynous roles and expressions that manifest in various transformative and performative self-portrait work. I often investigate abstraction, particularly what it means to queer abstraction. I frame my work in absurdity with a rawness in impact sourced from the power of vulnerability. I do not shy away from the potency of a variegating character and temperament, as the ambiguity of being a perceived consciousness in eternal flux complicates my creative output. My gender neutrality is far from neutral.