Mai-Thu Perret
Born in 1976.
Mai-Thu Perret is a multidisciplinary artist of French-Vietnamese origin whose training in literature serves as the point of departure for a practice that brings together writing, sculpture, performance, and installation; since 1999, she has notably developed a long-term narrative project entitled The Crystal Frontier.
Her academic trajectory includes a bachelor's degree in English literature obtained from the University of Cambridge in 1997 and participation in the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York between 2002 and 2003.
According to the documentation consulted, from 2016 onwards she distanced herself from The Crystal Frontier in order to focus on other narrative projects.
Perret's narrative logic is expressed through objects and figures: within The Crystal Frontier and beyond, she has produced sculptures that take up and transform existing models—such as Autoprogettazione I (2011), which reuses the design of a table by Enzo Mari—and series of life-size female figures assembled from mixed materials (ceramic, wicker, papier-mâché, latex, bronze, steel, textiles), such as Les Guérillères X/XII (2016).
Other recent installations explore stagings of objects and beings: the presentation entitled Othermothers brought together ceramic characters, glass birds, and paper clouds, while a ceramic work entitled Push Open Emptiness and Listen to the Sound appears in the exhibition documentation.
The materials employed frequently vary within a single work, combining traditional ceramic techniques with industrial or artisanal processes to produce figures that are often anthropomorphic or performative.
The performative dimension occupies a recurring place in her work: in 2011, in collaboration with Laurence Yadi, she devised the choreography Love Letters in Ancient Brick at the Swiss Institute / Contemporary Art New York, and in 2014 she presented Figures at the Biennale de l'Image en Mouvement in Geneva, a performance incorporating a life-size puppet.
Her work has been presented internationally since the early 2000s, in venues as varied as the Renaissance Society (Chicago), Spike Island (Bristol), the Nasher Sculpture Center (Dallas), the Swiss Institute (Rome), and MAMCO (Geneva), the latter of which devoted a retrospective to her from 10 October 2018 to 3 February 2019.
The sources also indicate the presence of works in public collections, notably at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA).
Alongside her practice, she has taught at HEAD – Genève since 2008.
The exhibition documentation consulted mentions presentations and loans “courtesy the artist and Simon Lee Gallery, London / Hong Kong”, indicating a representation or commercial loan relationship in certain exhibition contexts.
Critical and editorial production surrounding her work includes the monograph Mai‑Thu Perret : land of crystal (JRP/Ringier, 2008, co-edited with Christoph Keller) and a monographic study by Arielle Bier, published by Phaidon in 2017.
Taken together, the sources consulted present a practice in which literature and narrative structure visual, performative, and editorial dispositifs that articulate fictional narratives and concrete objects.