CAMINO IMPLACABLE – Charlie Mai

I met Charlie Mai when he was coming out of a strange episode: painful sores in his mouth had left him unable to speak for several days. After that forced pause, he began to talk to me calmly. He told me that he is an artist, that he was born in Virginia, that he is Chinese American, although he has never visited China. He can't write Chinese, though he can speak a little, and that's not unusual: speaking and writing Chinese are systems that are learned separately. Still - or perhaps because of that - he is interested in exploring the inherited gestures, the familiar languages that come from afar and are never quite complete.

He told me about his grandmother, who died recently, and his father in the U.S., faced with the question of how to say goodbye to her. Which ritual was the right one? That doubt opened a distance: a kind of outdated spiritual GPS, which points out paths but does not end up tracing them. In Bogota Charlie went to the Galerias shopping mall and consulted with the ladies in the Chinese stores. With their answers he put together something like an urban oracle, a feng shui assembled for the goodbye.

This is how he has built this exhibition, CAMINO IMPLACABLE (Relentless path): from intuitions, translated gestures and fragments that are difficult to interpret. The Bogotá subway -a project in the hands of Chinese workers almost invisible to the city- was one of the starting points. During one of the visits to the construction site in Bosa, together with Ronald and other workers, first a poem and then a collective stamp emerged, designed from their words and experiences, and hand-carved with a calligraphy invented for transit. The stamps -inspired in the Chinese pictorial tradition- do not affirm authorship, they infiltrate the image, they mark without signing and leave a record of a shared voice.

CAMINO IMPLACABLE speaks of rituals that are invented on the fly, of stories that no one tells in full, but that move forward as if nothing could stop them.

María Clara Arias Sierra, Curator.