This essay was produced in conjunction with the exhibition Yang Mai: Good Morning, China! (早上好，中国!), curated by David Humphrey, on view at CUE Art Foundation from February 20 – March 25, 2020. This text is included in the free exhibition catalogue available at CUE.
Yang Mai, Made in China, 2016. Clothes, paint, foam, gold leaf, silver leaf, metal, dimensions variable.
Yang Mai’s work asks us to submit to the terms of apparel. Nowhere is this clearer than in his studio, which I visited twice as he prepared for this exhibition. The space bursts with clothing in varying stages of conversion from raw material to finished sculpture. In the middle of the room were groups of business suits, sportswear, and school clothes, stiffened, painted, filled with spray foam, and arranged in constantly fluctuating configurations. Between these were sculptures comprising neatly stacked polo shirts, purposefully drab columns interrupted by off-kilter plastic spheres and fluorescent tube lights. Older sculptures—cylindrical trouser legs—leaned against one corner like lumber. Several large boxes packed with jeans and jackets lined the room, and Mai expected another shipment soon, uniforms this time.
Mai grew up in Guangzhou, China, and studied fashion design there, specializing in accessories. His original ambition was to work with underground fashion designers, as far away from rote commercialism and predictable design as possible, but by graduate school at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the purely sartorial had lost its appeal. No matter how radical the design, a shirt has to work as a shirt if you want someone to wear it.
Fashion is regularly used to both self-expressive and affiliative ends. But clothes are also a kind of prison, which create legible systems of social control and physical restriction. In our conversations, Mai stressed how uniforms imbue their wearer with particular roles and authority (or lack thereof). He related this to his upbringing in China, and to a certain extent, the societal codification he experienced there. Uniforms were used to communicate social roles and their attendant behavioral expectations: “student,” “teacher,” “worker.” At SAIC, Mai discovered that he could name the constraints of fashion and effectively criticize them—through art.
Yang Mai, Detail of Where's Happiness 1 (幸福在哪里 1), 2019-20. Chinese school uniforms, paint, foam, PVC pipe, dimensions variable.
Mai uses clothing to discuss archetypes, control, and the possibility of freedom. The three sit in a tense relationship, uneasy yet codependent. Mai incorporates rigidity into the visual language of his work—there are times when his garments feel more like shells than fabric. But he also uses the structural characteristics endemic to these clothes as opportunities to reconsider them as objects. Although his garments remain recognizable as types (like “blazer") and communicate their symbolic identities (as a specific school’s uniform jacket), the sculptures engage the formal opportunities and limitations of garments, rather than allowing their archetypal significations to determine composition and content.
In Where's Happiness 1 (幸福在哪 里 1), traditional Chinese school uniforms are individually inflated and hardened with spray foam, then assembled into color-coded chains and balanced against each other. Each chain of three or four garments is partially painted with transparent washes of one hue predominant in the original fabric—yellow, green, orange, or blue. This establishes visual continuity without denying that some differently colored areas have been coerced into assimilation with paint. Coercion plays a role in their connection as well: the garments are sewn and glued together at their orifices, forced together at holes for arms, legs, and torsos. In Where's Happiness 1 (幸福在哪 里 1), these formal manipulations encourage associative readings that free the garments from adhering to their roles as uniforms, relying on metaphor to undermine the garments’ conventional uses. I see limbs and torsos reaching out to each other, as if in desperation, rigid ecstasy, or as a snapshot of teams midway through a bizarre stretching competition. The effect is darkly humorous, somewhere between an exaggerated round of Twister and a cheerful group torture session.
Made in China, Mai’s previous body of work, featured tautly stuffed trouser legs, sometimes sequined or dipped in candy-colored paint, which directly engage the relationship between the manufacturing of clothing and the expressiveness of art. The viewer is encouraged to see each sculpture as bifurcated—as both pants and art; machine produced and individually adorned.
Mai’s new works focus on similar themes while integrating these differences in order to create causal relationships between the sculptures’ forms and the gestures they perform. For example, a sculpture comprising several khaki pant-legs painted silver suggests organic generation as a compositional strategy, rather than emphasizing the industrial facture of the garments. Each leg emerges like an intergalactic succulent from the waist or leg openings of other trousers, reaching up and down with an awkward sturdiness. The sculpture appears to make itself, like a root, rebelling against its machine-made origins. In this light, Mai’s work proposes aesthetics as a means toward radical freedom from the perspective of clothes: liberation from having to be filled by bodies, a refusal to participate in commercial distribution, and the request to be considered on their own terms.
This is a funny freedom. Within the terms of fashion there is not a lot of room for autonomous garments; they are always presented on and in relation to the body. And although the structures of the design, manufacturing, and distribution of clothing are much vaster than any individual, they remain relative to human scale because, like any commodity, they must appeal to human desires. Mai’s sculptures don’t deny the fact that their source materials were originally made for humans. In their final arrangements, they often resemble cartoon bodies or stick figures. But despite their residual anthropomorphism, the garments feel as though they don’t need us—or our systems—anymore. They have made do on their own, begun to create their own forms of association and expression, as art. Their physical contours may have been decided in relation to human form, but their permutations and growths perform perversions of this origin. They germinate, contort, and spread with the logic of their own forms, prioritizing their own dimensions, the effects of fabric and mobility of seams over human joints, flesh, and bones. The spray foam that hardens their interiors may be ungainly, and may emphasize the void-ish emptiness of a garment’s interior, but it allows them to be seen outside of their use for humans.
Still, within the sculptures’ configurations lurks an existential gloom. They strive, emerge, and grow, but toward what? The figures appear to compete, but at what game? What would it mean to win? Mai’s sculptures acknowledge that freedom comes as a reaction to forces of control, here enacted by the recognizability of silhouettes and costume. There is no liberty without constraints to be freed from, after all.
This essay was written as part of the Art Critic Mentoring Program, a partnership between AICA-USA (US section of International Association of Art Critics) and CUE, which pairs emerging writers with AICA-USA mentors to produce original essays on a specific exhibiting artist. Please visit aicausa.org for more information on AICA-USA, or cueartfoundation.org to learn how to participate in this program. Any quotes are from interviews with the author unless otherwise specified. No part of this essay may be reproduced without prior consent from the author. Lilly Wei is AICA’s Coordinator for the program this season.
Gaby Collins-Fernandez is an artist living and working in New York City, whose work has been shown both in the US and internationally. She is a recipient of residencies at Yaddo (Saratoga Springs, NY) and the Marble House Project (Dorset, VT), and was awarded a 2013 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Art Award. Collins-Fernandez is also a writer about art, a co-founder and publisher of the annual magazine Precog, and a co-director of the artist-run art and music initiative BombPop!Up.
Mentor William Fenstermaker is an art critic based in New York and an editor at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. He has written catalogue essays on Pierre Huyghe (de Young Museum, 2020) and Shen Fan (Eli Klein Gallery, 2018), and his writings on art, politics, and culture have been published by Artforum, BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Paris Review, Surface, and more. Fenstermaker was formerly a reviews editor of The Brooklyn Rail. He holds an MFA in art criticism and writing from New York's School of Visual Arts, and is currently a board member and treasurer of the US chapter of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA-USA).