Yeni Mao
Fig. 33. 9 Your Love is a King
Fig. 33. 9 Your Love is a King by Yeni Mao is a sculpture made of blackened steel, brass, glazed ceramic, and leather. The work’s bended steel armature, footrest, handle, and grip evoke a serpentine pipe system that resembles arteries and veins. The material’s hardness—Mao frequently uses steel for its connotations in modern architecture associated with masculinity—is softened by the incorporation of studs and brass rings that are reminiscent of body ornaments and piercings. By pairing the seductive tactility of certain materials to the rigidity of architecture, the work speaks about bodily engagement; liberated versus restrained sexuality; queerness and fetishism, as well as cultures and subcultures.
As if it were a metaphor of the artist’s body, this piece also presents itself as a reference to a narrative that opens up a mute but resonating dialogue with Mao’s own family history. The artist associates the suspended glazed severed chicken head with the figure of his father, and specifically with the Taoist traditional rites that framed his grandfather’s funerary ceremony in Fuchuan. As Mao himself narrates, when his father took his grandfather’s ashes back to China to be buried, a big parade was organised during which he discovered the existence of two other families besides his own. Your Love is a King is an intent of coming to terms with this patriarchal legacy.
Yeni Mao’s sculptures have a narrative undertone and are frequently autobiographical, with regard to the Canadian Chinese artist’s transnational background. Interlaced and recurrent themes and strategies in Mao’s practice draw upon notions of displacement and migration, the fragmented and sexualized body, and its relationship to the built environment. Mao’s sculptures and installations comprise ceramics, volcanic rocks, brass, steel, and leather—all materials whose contrasting textures, volumes, and densities are constantly played against each other. Mao’s work is composed of evocative clues and fragments that are partly abstract, partly zoomorphic, and sometimes anthropomorphic. Their domestic appeal or industrial character is always suggestive of the cultural elements that surround the artist or the non-Western traditions that he left behind. Mao’s practice is alchemic insofar as his work is reduced to the most primal materials in order to transform them into what he terms “objects of significance”.