MIMI BIYAO BAI
Artist Statement
My work uses camouflage to explore how the cultural fantasies we have inherited about assimilation, labor, and survival both confirm and contradict our lived realities. Camouflage involves making oneself invisible or hyper-visible, sometimes simultaneously. Like assimilation, the process of camouflage is dependent on the context in which someone is being seen as well as who is doing the seeing.
My exploration of this connection between camouflage and assimilation began with my personal experience of immigrating to the U.S., and my ideas evolved as I considered how my individual narrative is situated within a history of empire, settler colonialism, and extraction, but also a history of adaptation, resilience, and interdependence. My research into bushcraft and early twentieth-century military applications of camouflage revealed that nets have often been used as an adaptable and multi-functional technology. They can disguise tanks, people, and positions in a variety of landscapes, while also providing shade or cover. In my work, nets play both a poetic and utilitarian role as objects that can hold, connect, conceal, and entangle.
I mark the invisible and immaterial exertions required to blend into one’s environment using clay, ink, and thread, as well as the encumbered movements of my body captured by the camera. Labor weaves concepts and materials together, meaning accumulates through repetition and iteration, and ideas are processed through the sustained physical engagement of my body. I’m also invested in understanding the artist as a worker, recognizing the different forms that artistic labor takes, and also connecting this labor to that of other workers, complicating the fantasy of the individual, atomized “artist-genius.”