With a playful attitude and conceptual rigor, Maia Chao creates work that unpacks the absurdity of contemporary human culture, from the collapse of public infrastructure to the behaviors of a museum visit. Ahead of her performance at the Whitney Biennial, we spoke with Maia about becoming an artist, the ambivalence of group work, and what it feels like to be alive right now. The conversation yielded a welcome reminder that the pursuit of joy is a worthwhile endeavor.

Jessica Gomez Ferrer: When did you know you wanted to be an artist?

Maia Chao: I grew up in a family of artists. My mom and dad are both artists and art teachers, so it wasn't a huge departure from what I knew. 

There are two moments that come to mind. What feels like my first art project was actually a seven-year obsession with this fake store that I created when I was seven years old in my family’s basement called Harland’s. I was fascinated by all the transactions that structure our everyday interactions and adult life. I had this alter ego named Eveny Chefa, who was the manager and cashier at the store. I would price everything in the basement. Every birthday and Christmas, all my gifts were for Harland's. I had a cash register from my uncle's company that they were getting rid of. I would often have imaginary customers, but when I was lucky, I would coerce my family into being my customers and make them sign a million forms in order to get a can of beans or whatever from the pantry. I wasn't cognizant of it at the time, but it feels like a precursor to a lot of my practice now. 

In college, I worked at Indigenous community radio stations in Guatemala for my undergrad research in cultural anthropology, and I started having this craving to bring play, experimentation, and collaboration into my interests. I was focusing on Indigenous language revival and revitalization, and I was seeing so many ways I wanted to work with these community radio practitioners that weren't in the realm of ethnographic research. I became more and more interested in becoming an artist and the permission of that.

Jessica: You mentioned that you studied cultural anthropology in undergrad. What drew you to that field and how has it informed your work as an artist?

Maia: I wanted to study film in college and was going to do that, but then I unintentionally went with my friend to an introduction to cultural anthropology class. I was like, wait, you can study people and culture? I had thought of anthropology as relegated to the past. I was astonished that we could study contemporary human culture and all the norms, values, social scripts, behaviors, structures, and institutions that are used to organize life and to relate to one another. It gave me a framework for thinking about how I am always showing up in my identity and influencing the situations I'm in. How are my interests conditioned by the many intersecting privileges and oppressions of an identity? 

As I mentioned, I researched Indigenous community radio in Guatemala and worked with community organizers fighting to legalize it. After the Civil War in Guatemala took place in the '90s, the radio was turned to as a tool to rebuild communities. It functioned as a message board for organizing amidst the villages and became an alternative space for education and linguistic revitalization of the twenty-one Mayan languages that weren’t being taught in schools. My focus became linguistic anthropology specifically and how language is a way into understanding our systems and values. The radio as a social medium was a pathway to thinking about art as a social medium.

Jessica: Shifting gears a little bit, I'm curious why you're drawn to objects of collective disenchantment.

Maia: We're in this state of collapse with public infrastructure where resources are being privatized and public resources are dwindling. We’re experiencing so much loss and struggle as public life is stripped of its supports under fascism and an authoritarian regime. My interest in objects of collective disenchantment is about how many institutions are failing us, and how we remain attached to them and also deeply dissatisfied with them, from the federal government to universities to museums.

There's so much ambivalence in wanting to make art and believe in art institutions. They are failing us in many ways. There's so much contradiction and injustice in the systems that we rely on or are part of.

It is impossible to move through the world without incurring moral injury, without constantly participating in interlocking systems of injustice, violence, and genocide. What I mean by collective disenchantment is that there's this way that we're stuck in these binds, and there's really no way to live in alignment with your values. Being on stolen land undergirds everything. We're always already living these contradictions.

This idea makes me think of Lauren Berlant's Cruel Optimism. She describes the paradox of being attached to things that hinder your own flourishing, as the promise of a stable "good life" fades. It refers to how people cling to these unattainable fantasies of upward mobility, job security, and happiness, even as social structures fail to deliver them. She talks about this leading to a double loss of the desired object and the belief in achieving it. I think that comes to mind as one of the things I continually come back to when I'm stuck in a loop of wanting to do something that hurts. This idea that something we desire is actually an obstacle to our flourishing really resonates with me.

Jessica: I'm curious what Vox Populi has taught you about working collaboratively.

Maia: I joined Vox Populi when I moved to Philadelphia in 2021. I was feeling quite disillusioned by the art world. Unless you have a vibrant community, it can be quite a lonely thing to make art because we live in a culture and societal structure that doesn't really value the work of artists. I was briefly in New York and could not handle the intensity of that city, which felt competitive and neverending. It moved at a pace that I couldn't keep up with. I wanted to be in an artistic context and community that was more grassroots or emergent, created by artists and made for artists. It was so meaningful to become part of a collective space that has stuck around and been a pillar of art and culture in Philadelphia since the 1980s. 

Vox is a space where we're all getting together to figure out how to host other artists' shows, how to host each other's shows, and how to be in more dialogue with each other's practices. It is one of many DIY art collectives and artist-run spaces that really decenter the dominant art institutions. We're not going to wait around for the ICA or the PMA to give us a show. We'll just make it ourselves. I’ve increasingly been showing in more dominant art institutions, and it makes me appreciate the ways that Vox is a scrappy, slim operating space that can give artists so much more freedom than they're afforded in more restricted bureaucratic contexts.

I've learned about collective decision-making and the challenges of making things happen when you're a collective of fifteen to twenty people. It’s thorny. There are a lot of ways that it's slow and it doesn't work and it breaks down, and that's just part of what it is.

Also, our membership rotates, and I’m no longer a member, but I’m still working on Vox’s upcoming project called An Endless Meeting, which is part of a citywide activation of DIY and collectively run art spaces in Philadelphia in the fall called Collective Futures. Vox’s project title is part of a book title from Francesca Polletta, Freedom is An Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements (2002). The exhibition refers to how much of group work is structured by meetings; it explores the politics of group work and collective creation. 

My dad’s mentor said that so much of making art is staying with the struggle, and I feel like Vox is staying with the struggle of collective work and artmaking. It's never finished, and it's always messy and forming and unfolding, and it's about staying with it.

Jessica: I love that you're using the term “group work” instead of “collaboration.” It brings you back to being in school where you have a project and you're all trying to figure out your roles.

Maia: I owe that language to Ethan Philbrick, whose book, Group Works, we read together at Vox. It offers analyses of group works and traces feelings of ambivalence toward groups. The ambivalence being that there are ways that groups and collectivity are at once romanticized and deeply feared.

I also think often of “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” an essay written by the feminist Jo Freeman in 1970. She talks about how any group that claims to be structureless or non-hierarchical is a myth. If you don't have a structure, it will form along the pre-existing lines of power and people will wield power without recognition or responsibility. She contends that formal structure is necessary to counteract this inevitability.

Jessica: Speaking of group work, could you talk a little bit about your upcoming performance for the Whitney Biennial?

Maia: I'm creating this new performance with an incredible creative team. I'm collaborating with Lena Engelstein, who's a choreographer; Ryan Gamblin, who's a sound designer; Nina Ryser, a Philadelphia musician who made some synth tracks and sound collages for the show; and then a group of twelve incredible performers. I'm lead artist on it, but very much devising the piece in collaboration with everyone. 

It feels like a full circle moment from the five years I worked with my collaborator, Josephine Devanbu, on Look at Art. Get Paid., which was about paying people who had never been to an art museum to come visit as guest critics of the art and the institution. It was a five-year social practice project that redirected flows of private money to the public and questioned who has the money, time, and sense of belonging to even go to an art museum.

I'm getting to tackle a lot of the questions and curiosities of museum conventions inside this performance, which explores the theatricality and choreography of a museum visit in the galleries of the Whitney Museum's permanent collection on their seventh floor. It's about the visitor's experience, so rather than focusing on the artworks themselves, I’m thinking about the social rules, scripts, and patterns that condition our encounters with art. 

I’m interested in this idea of the fantasy of having a profound encounter with art — of being moved or even transformed by it — and then also the ambivalent realities of contemporary spectatorship where you're thirsty, your feet hurt, and you're looking for a bench. The work plays with these ordinary and minor dramas of the museum visit. 

A museum has so many rules. You're not supposed to touch things; there are alarms and stanchions and all these things that are telling you that your body is a threat. Showing art to the public is one imperative of a museum, but protecting the financial capital of that work is another imperative, and is ultimately the priority by virtue of its value.

A museum visitor really has to encounter this tension that we — by being these uncontrollable, moving, living, breathing, drinking, salivating people — inherently pose a threat to collections. Life and its changing-ness is always a threat to any collection of art. The way that this threat is managed can feel quite oppressive. They’re such spaces of limitation, but I love museums, and so this project is contending with the various contradictions of a museum visit.

Jessica: It sounds fascinating, and I think in so much of your work, you do an excellent job of sitting within tension. One of my favorite projects of yours is with your sister where you're in your parents' basement trying to sell their stuff. My last question for you is what role does humor play in your practice? Because I thought that project was funny.

Maia Chao: That was one of my favorite projects and I'm chasing it. I want to collaborate with my sister again. I love to work with her. She's my original collaborator. That project was really fun and funny to make together. And I think with this project at the Whitney there are moments that are quite funny. There's so much absurdity, play, and humor in a lot of my work, which isn't necessarily what I set out to do, but it's often what emerges.

I think being alive in this modern world is quite absurd. And the collapse of space and time that characterizes our experience makes it feel insane. Like, if we just think of scrolling on Instagram, seeing a friend on vacation, images of war and destruction, and some cute shoes can all collapse into one second. A lot of my work is attempting to speak to the absurdity of our contemporary human condition and what it feels like to be alive right now. 

But in terms of process, there is just the fact that I love to laugh. I love to have fun. I love to collaborate. Artmaking is such a privilege. One of the things I love most about it is being able to work with other people and spend time together. I think being able to create containers for joy and play and experimentation and discovery and absurdity and laughter is important. It’s how I want to spend my days. Not in an escapist sense of living only in that realm as a person, but within my art practice, that is a priority. I believe that the way in which an artwork is made is embedded in the spirit of the work. 

In the case of Gently Used, we were using this absurd premise of trying to get my parents to get rid of stuff in their basement by hosting a fake QVC Shopping Network TV show and selling things on eBay. My parents were having a lot of trouble getting things out of their basement. It was this looming thing, and I was like, "Okay, well, there's clearly charge here. How can I intervene and maybe playfully move us toward letting go of some of these things and question why the hell we're keeping this aerobic step from the '90s around?" Humor functioned as a way to move toward what was feeling sticky and what we were all avoiding. The opportunity to play together in what otherwise might be a painful context was the proposition of that work.