Mai Ide
Mai Ide’s work investigates her own cultural intersectionality as a Japanese immigrant, mother, wife,
and female, using her hands to touch, manipulate, and sculpt objects from residues of modern society.
She traces her personal and family history in search of who she is. Her research on Japanese internment
camps excavates her identity because of how it demonstrates the way the rest of the world views people,
particularly women of Mai’s heritage. It allows Mai to connect between the past, present, and future,
which strengthens and amplifies her reason for creating art to talk about the Japanese diaspora.
Representing her identity as a duality between Japaneseness and Americaness entails complexity, multiplicity, and versatility. Her research into Japanese American history has determined how she chooses her materials. She uses materials such as glass, clay, and textiles as a metaphor to demonstrate marginalized people’s vulnerability and brokenness, but also their endurance.
Mai grapples with systemic racism, spatial boundaries, inequity, prescribed gender roles, and anti-Asian depictions and violence in the practice of her art. She seeks to reframe and reclaim Asian culture as appropriated and misunderstood by the Western gaze. She desires to reconcile the gap between the spatial reality and the ideal.
Mai’s recent series of works focuses on the imposition of a grid on objects and Asian bodies. The idea of a grid is a metaphor for two concepts. The first is the grid as a representation of American values, social norms, and standardizations on the body. It also represents the authority of power imposed on minority people. At the same time, the grid refers to the shoji screen, which is a traditional Japanese door, as her protection, and as a form of resistance by creating a boundary between herself and white supremacy. The shoji also acts as a filter to let light in while still protecting one’s authentic self.
These works show a sense of vulnerability within these circumstances by showing how Asian people are ignored, even as their culture is appropriated by the Western gaze. In order to resist oppression, people of the Asian diaspora must break free of the established grid, and create a space for themselves. As an Asian artist, Mai is always seeking new spaces, both physical and metaphorical, for Asian artists to commune, converse, and share their art.
Representing her identity as a duality between Japaneseness and Americaness entails complexity, multiplicity, and versatility. Her research into Japanese American history has determined how she chooses her materials. She uses materials such as glass, clay, and textiles as a metaphor to demonstrate marginalized people’s vulnerability and brokenness, but also their endurance.
Mai grapples with systemic racism, spatial boundaries, inequity, prescribed gender roles, and anti-Asian depictions and violence in the practice of her art. She seeks to reframe and reclaim Asian culture as appropriated and misunderstood by the Western gaze. She desires to reconcile the gap between the spatial reality and the ideal.
Mai’s recent series of works focuses on the imposition of a grid on objects and Asian bodies. The idea of a grid is a metaphor for two concepts. The first is the grid as a representation of American values, social norms, and standardizations on the body. It also represents the authority of power imposed on minority people. At the same time, the grid refers to the shoji screen, which is a traditional Japanese door, as her protection, and as a form of resistance by creating a boundary between herself and white supremacy. The shoji also acts as a filter to let light in while still protecting one’s authentic self.
These works show a sense of vulnerability within these circumstances by showing how Asian people are ignored, even as their culture is appropriated by the Western gaze. In order to resist oppression, people of the Asian diaspora must break free of the established grid, and create a space for themselves. As an Asian artist, Mai is always seeking new spaces, both physical and metaphorical, for Asian artists to commune, converse, and share their art.