Drawing on a background in anthropology, Maia Chao often approaches art through observation, then asking the question: where Do Where did the art in the doctor’s office come from? how Do Do you make a living as an artist? Based on these inquiries, often through imitation or reproduction, the resulting works can make the mundane appear absurd, beautiful, or disturbing.
The same goes for filler words. 2016 audio works hesitant particleChao interviewed native speakers of 31 different languages to collect samples of “hesitation particles” – used in most languages to mark pauses or hesitations in speech, like “um” in English. Elaine Chao’s final composition is atmospheric—like being immersed in the deep deliberations of a group of global strangers. Another project, “Pictures of Health (2022),” began with weird art in a doctor’s office. After spending a particularly excruciating three hours in the waiting room staring at a landscape painting—“arguably one of the longest times I’ve ever thought about a piece of art,” she told me—she opened a show at Philadelphia’s Vox Populi gallery with paintings borrowed from the offices of 27 local health care providers. Zhao replaced the originals with monochromatic canvases, thus hosting two exhibitions at the same time; what you see depends on where you go to view the art.
Maya Zhao: health picture2022.
Provided by Maia Chao
Elaine Chao has a particularly curious eye on the art world. In “Seeing Art. Getting Paid” (2015-20), Zhao worked with collaborator Josephine Devanbu to invite people who don’t normally visit art museums as paid guest critics. The project was first piloted at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum and has since been adapted at several other institutions. Working with more than 200 interviewees and 41 paid guest critics, she addressed the fact that while museums receive public funding, 90 percent of museum visitors are still overwhelmingly wealthy, white men. In her 2021 video expression of artistic creation, Chao shamelessly documents the material means by which she was able to produce the videos we watch—car expenses, honoraria, education.
Merging bureaucracy and absurdity is Chao’s signature. Another thread of hers is labor, particularly the way neoliberalism colonizes our culture, our time, and our bodies. exist American idle (2025), commissioned by Times Square Arts, Chao collaborated with choreographer Lena Engelstein to create an hour-long movement piece. Surrounded by Times Square’s spectacular advertising, Chao’s performers seem trapped in small, repetitive movements: cooling off in a shirt, taking a selfie, eating a bag of potato chips. Chao mapped these movements by observing the movements of Times Square visitors, as well as the circular gestures of 3D figures in crowd simulation software: the uncanny feeling is heightened by the fact that each performer is played by an identically dressed doppelgänger. Eventually, the performers begin counting down the days until the new year will never arrive. Some alters kiss or cry.
Chao’s most recent commission, a performance for the 2026 Whitney Biennial, involved a museum tour, creating a script based on audio footage of her friends exploring museums. “I really don’t like to invent material out of thin air; I prefer to find a script or a language,” she explains. The piece highlights the more physical aspects of being in a museum – using the bathroom, needing a seat, hunger – and also demeans the institution by drawing attention to the museum’s oddly named Reproduction Commission. In Chao’s eyes, mediocrity becomes so much that contemporary existence occasionally inspires doubt and gives us glimpses of other ways of being.
