H Gallery Chiang Mai is very pleased to announce a solo exhibition by Maymay Jumsai. Thai-born Maymay is already very well known for her works in painting and this exhibition introduces the artist’s increased engagement with installation since she relocated to the US. The title is a neologism created from the words react, common and maximum and reflects the artist’s evolving relationship to personal and collective cultural heritage: between Thai and Chinese ancestry and the influence of disparate art histories. In reacommaxion she explores limits of understanding, seeking relationships and correspondences between traditions and pushing beyond categorical distinctions.
reacommaxion re-looks and re-invents. A selection of Maymay’s signature paintings that carry a lush and abstracted aesthetic reverberate off the artist’s painterly appropriations of Western historical masterpieces and are physically linked by a large floor sculpture that subverts canonical formalism with a richly evocative suggestion of personal memory. The familiarity of traditions shifts towards divergent relationships and new narratives.
As questions of the trans-national artist, global circuits of exchange and cultural difference continue to receive vexed debate, reacommaxion offers timely insights into what it can mean to think again about what we believe we already know.
Siriprapha – Maymay - Jumsai na Ayudhya was born in Bangkok and educated in the UK and US, where she received a MFA from the University of Chicago in 2013. She has exhibited extensively, including the Bridgeport Art Center (2013), Chicago, Lotus Art de Vivre (2012), Shanghai and a number of exhibitions at H Gallery. Other projects include commissions for the Privy Council Building and Plaza Athénée, both in Bangkok, and Maymay played the lead role in M.C. Chatrichalerm Yukol’s film The Last Love (2000-1). She has taught at the University of Chicago and Bangkok’s Silpakorn University.