Mai Ling, Becoming Stickiness, 2023 video still
MAI LING
Secession
Friedrichstraße 12, 1010 Wien
15.9. – 12.11.2023
Founded in Vienna in 2019, MAI LING is an artists’ collective and association dedicated to facilitating dialogues about experiences of racism, sexism, homophobia, and any kind of prejudgment, particularly against Asian FLINT* (women*, lesbian, inter*, non-binary, and trans*). Encouraging and contextualizing contemporary Asian art and culture, Mai Ling employs a variety of artistic and discursive formats such as performances, texts, videos, sound, installations, talk series, interventions, and protests.
THE EXHIBIT:
In NOT YOUR ORNAMENT Mai Ling investigates the racialized and gendered logic of “Ornamentalism”—a term conflating “Orientalism” and “ornamental” that the American feminist scholar Anne Anlin Cheng discusses in her book of that title, which analyses how the European and American imagination has constructed Asian femininity as a hybrid human being and decorative object. Mai Ling challenges such an objectified condition through ornamental and invasive plants. Drawing on the Secession’s close relation to the Art Nouveau movement—often characterized by ornamental designs inspired by natural forms, such as flowers and plants—Mai Ling aims to reclaim their agency confronted by the decorative aesthetics that perpetuates the sexualization and dehumanization of Asian bodies within white society.
In this exhibition, the kudzu plant plays a central role in relation to the concept of “stickiness” as an agency of resistance and pleasure. Initially introduced as an “ornamental” plant during the Centennial International Exhibition of 1876 in the U.S., and later used in agriculture to prevent soil erosion, the vine is now considered invasive in most of the Western world. Native to East and Southeast Asia and some Pacific islands, kudzu is known for its beneficial properties as a weaving material and as part of traditional medicine and cuisine, with the starch of its roots being used as a thickener and sticky ingredient.
Photos by Iris Ranzinger & Mai