CAMINO IMPLACABLE – Charlie Mai

I met Charlie Mai as he was recovering from a strange episode: painful sores in his mouth had left him unable to speak for several days. After that forced pause, he began to speak to me calmly. He told me that he is an artist, that he was born in Virginia, and 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 skills learned separately. Still, or perhaps because of that, he is interested in exploring inherited gestures, the family languages passed down from afar that are never quite complete.

He told me about his grandmother, who had recently died, and his father in the U.S., who was faced with the question of how to say goodbye to her. Which ritual was the right one? That uncertainty created a distance: a kind of outdated spiritual GPS, pointing toward routes it can never quite map. In Bogotá, Charlie went to the Galerías shopping mall and consulted the women working in the Chinese shops. From their answers, he assembled something like an urban oracle, a kind of feng shui for a farewell.

This is how he built this exhibition, CAMINO IMPLACABLE (Relentless Path): through intuitions, translated gestures, and fragments that resist interpretation. The Bogotá Metro, a project being built in part by Chinese workers who remain almost invisible to the city, was one of the starting points. During a visit to the construction site in Bosa with Ronald and other workers, a poem emerged, followed by a collective seal designed from their words and experiences and hand-carved using a form of calligraphy invented for transit. The seals, inspired by the Chinese tradition of seal carving, do not assert authorship. They infiltrate the image, mark without signing, and leave a record of a shared voice.

CAMINO IMPLACABLE speaks of rituals 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