Mimi Bai: HIDE AND SEE, curated by Amanda Contrada
Boston Center for the Arts - Mills Gallery
551 Tremont Street
Boston, MA 02116
On view: December 16, 2022 - February 18, 2023 (open Weds - Sat, 1 - 6 pm)
Opening Reception: Friday, December 16, 2022, 6–9pm
Artist in Conversation and Exhibition Walkthrough: Saturday, January 28 @ 2pm
Film Screening with Live Score: Saturday, February 4, 2023 @ 4 pm
In Mimi Bai: HIDE AND SEE, Bai contemplates camouflage as a metaphor for assimilation, a labor-intensive process, and a methodology for survival and communication that selectively conceals and reveals.
Camouflage involves making oneself invisible or hyper-visible, sometimes simultaneously. Bai draws parallels between this process and her experience of assimilation as an immigrant from China. She contextualizes this personal history within a historical and political framework that traces how capitalism and settler colonialism demand self-effacement in exchange for opportunity and a sense of safety.
Bai marks the unrecognized labor of assimilation using clay, ink, and string, as well as the encumbered movements of her body captured on camera. These repetitive and taxing actions make physical the often invisible and immaterial exertions required to “blend in” to one’s environment.
By abstracting fragments of her personal and familial history into patterns and forms, Bai has developed her own iconography that she employs throughout the works in the exhibition. A prominent example is the ghost, which emerged from a costume Bai wore as a child during her first Halloween in the US, then evolved through her research into ghillie suits — garments worn by snipers and hunters to conceal their bodies from an enemy or target.
The ghosts in the exhibition serve as avatars for the artist as she reflects on the shifting and conditional state of the alien and the marginalized. Across drawing, sculpture, and film, Bai re-imagines and enacts alternative perspectives on survival, adaptation, improvisation, and creative possibility.