“I Want to Carry All of It”: Mee Jey & Jenny Wu in Conversation
aug 2020
Mee Jey is a multi-disciplinary Indian artist based in St. Louis, USA. She has a master’s degree in Fine Art from Sam Fox School of Arts, WUSTL and research degree in History from India. Her works originate from personal happenings and acquire political nature addressing issues of immigration, identity, politics of power, concept of time and philosophies of reality. She interacts with her audience through complex layering of works that includes 2-dimensional works, sculptures, interactive and participatory performances.
Jenny Wu is an art historian and creative writing instructor based in St. Louis. She is an alumnus of the Tin House Summer Workshop and has served as the Senior Fiction Fellow at Washington University in St. Louis. Her short stories can be found in BOMB Magazine, The Literary Review, The Conium Review, Hobart, and wildness. Her essays on film can be found in Erudition Magazine and wig-wag magazine.
It takes a particular kind of artist to muster the forbearance to explore the infinitudes of quotidian life with relentless vigor. For exemplars, we might look to Tehching Hsieh’s One Year Performances, On Kawara’s “I Got Up…” postcards, or Renee Gladman’s Calamities, in which each piece of microprose begins with the phrase, “I began the day…”. Nowadays, we should add St. Louis-based artist Mee Jey to the list.
Mee Jey’s practice is as difficult to align with that of another artist as it is to pin down under one category. Her work, which combines aspects of Conceptual art and performance art, is as far-reaching in its experimentation as it is focused in its intention. Mee Jey’s archival projects, such as Constant Variable (2020-) and 365 Days Mee & Jey (2019), are unique in that they don’t produce what one might imagine is a typical archive. Mee Jey does not catalogue for the sake of mummifying time or foreclosing flux; rather, this part of her practice is an act of growing closer to her subject matter. Her large-scale works and performances, too, tend to elude classification, existing comfortably at the crossroads of multiple disciplines.I wanted to get a better sense of the forms that tessellate in Mee Jey’s mind, so, on a Friday afternoon, I struck up a conversation about her current projects and the studio practice she has cultivated over the years.
PRESENTing PAST (2019). fabric, wood, acrylic paint.
Jenny Wu: Let’s start with Constant Variable, which is in some ways your daily art practice, in some ways your personal diary. Can you speak a bit on how this particular series began? Why “constant variable”—when you’re making these daily portraits, what stays constant and what varies?
Mee Jey: Constant Variable is my third successive collaborative project about quotidian life with my partner Jey Sushil.
As an artist, I needed to celebrate our tenth anniversary. I decided to relook at this variable (person) in my life who has been constantly there for me and with me all this while. I have known my husband since 2001. Also, this was a conscious decision to give some attention to my marriage after a very hectic school life and motherhood period since we moved to the U.S. in 2017. I could think of no better way to celebrate this togetherness.
While we moved homes four times in last four years, we left a continent and professional life behind. Many things changed. At some point everything was new for us. However, I had little problem in settling with these changes because of the constant presence and support of Sushil. This is the reality of my life in this new continent. I decided to look at my life from different perspectives that would help create a larger and fuller picture of my lived reality. Sushil has been a subject of my creative practice since 2012. I needed to look back at this constant element in my life only to review the significance of it. While my subject, Jey Sushil, is constant, each day is a variable. The happenings of every passing day is different in some degree. In fact, I am forcing myself to look at each day in a different light through my subject’s reaction to it and then to portray that reaction using variable materials and techniques.
JW: I’m struck by the way your view of quotidian life is filtered through multiple subjectivities, particularly because you are interpreting the subjectivity of a person you love. I’m interested to know how you and Sushil relate to each other artistically outside of this daily practice of interpreting and collaborating. For instance, do the two of you discuss craft?
MJ: Over the past few years, most of our conversations including domestic affairs directly or indirectly involve creative elements. Initially, we deliberately looked at every mundane object, scenario, and problem as an art idea which now has become a mental habit. Very often we talk about our own lives as if it is a performance. It sounds strange, but we do it so often that it feels weird sometimes to us as well.
Central Periphery (2019). fabric, wood, foam, motorized base.
JW: It’s very interesting to think about one’s life as an artwork or a performance, since it would be an artwork that, like a fibonacci sequence, contains within it many smaller artworks, both your own and others’. Of course, life contains not only artistically generative moments but also practical, pedestrian moments. I’m wondering how you and Sushil have dealt with the practical, professional problems of art-making over the years. Obviously there were the big changes: moving homes, getting your MFA, having a child. But there are also little changes, like encountering a new artist, artwork, book, or film—has anything like that ever inspired a new project or changed your methodology?
MJ: I enjoyed visual arts more as a passion in my school years until Sushil gifted me the book The Story of Art by E.H. Gombrich. This book introduced me to art as a profession. Apparently, he was impressed with my drawings and took interest in art during his stay in London to connect with me creatively. Whichever way it was, art became the strongest connection between us even before we got romantically involved with each other. He was the one who coaxed me to explore my options in visual arts when I suffered an unexpected (and acutely painful) rupture in my academic life. I had my first solo exhibition of large scale drawings in 2012. After that there was no looking back, despite strong resistance from my parents.
Sushil is a man of ideas. He bombards me with information about art, artists, political happenings, and historical events. He always comes up with the weirdest of ideas that I churn over months and years to give shape. He is my bounce-board and the most stringent critic of my works. In this case I have very little to offer to him other than being his first and ever-willing audience and editor.
JW: Coming from a writer’s point of view, having someone willing to read and edit your work is already so much! And those things take quite a bit of time and effort. I’m fascinated by this balance—or, duel, even—of opposite traits that yields art. Part of me wonders if it has to do with medium—you are a visual artist, Sushil is a writer—or coming from different disciplines—you out of academia, Sushil out of journalism. Of course these are vague categories that don’t add up to much, ultimately, but do you think that the multi-disciplinary nature of your partnership influences the way you approach your own projects?
MJ: We conceived the idea of marriage as a companionship and mutual growth. The best way to evolve in life and marriage was if we could help each other grow in our areas of interest. We always looked for ways to incorporate the other in our individual interests and creative projects. Since we realized our interests in visual and textual arts early on, we kept each other’s company in the most creative ways possible.
My weakest point is Sushil’s strongest area and vice-versa. He can think and be extremely critical of his own works, my works, and our collaborative works, but he does not know how to create or improvise. I can immediately visualize his weirdest idea and keep working on its form and production process. He gets a hundred ideas every day but loses interest quickly. I can nurse one idea for years and work on it for years without get-ting frustrated. Instead of working in the same area, we work on issues that suit our temperament and skill set for the same creative project.
From this effort of keeping each others’ company on the path of individual growth emerged the relational-traveling art project ARTOLOGUE: ART FOR ALL (2013), Hungry Diary: a visual narrative (2012-13), I In Togetherness, a 52-week long photographic performance on the evolution of two individuals as a couple (May 2016-May 2017), 365 Days Mee & Jey, a two minute video-performance about quotidian life of an artist couple (Jan 2019-Dec 31, 2019), and now this: Constant Variable, a 366-day portrait series.
We do not necessarily engage in equal weightage in each project, but we do give our best in creating, producing, documenting, and publishing the projects.
Our collaborative projects are all besides my studio practice, which is very dominant aspect of my larger practice.
Mee Jey and her son in the studio.
JW: Can you speak a bit about your studio practice? What are some of your established rituals, and how has this practice changed depending on where you’ve been geographically?
MJ: My studio practice is very organic and multidisciplinary. In fact, I always respond to my personal and social surrounding in a political manner. In this process I try to distance away from my personal reflections. I believe it is important to keep your extremely personal gaze broadened in the work so that more people in different temporal and spatial context may connect with it.
I do not hasten to give any idea a form. I mull over it in my head while going through my daily chores. I expose myself to more materials and situations during this time, as I am highly receptive to information that my brain can process in order to give form to the idea I am nursing. I process the form in physical, digital, and textual forms and in performative elements. I try to see if there could be an audio element to it or juxtaposition of some other/others’ work. This ritual or, say, pattern does not tie me to a space or material. This is one reason I could continue creating and producing work regardless of my physical moves across continents and the metamorphic shift from being a woman to mother.
JW: You also incorporate virtual space and social media directly into your creative process, in works like ARTOLOGUE: ART FOR ALL and I In Togetherness. Tell me a little about the significance of documenting and sharing your work online.
MJ: I began using social media to more actively engage with my audience. Interestingly, it was through these virtual meeting places that I received invitations from recreational and social welfare organizations to travel and produce murals. That was when I first realized the power of social media as a space for dialogical art and, later, exhibition.
For works like Prayer (My Baby), I decided not to go the traditional route of documenting the performance and exhibiting it later in a gallery. Instead, I wanted the audience to feel a sense of immediacy in the witnessing of the act. I wanted to create a sense of proximity with my audience both physically (viewing on a mobile device) and temporally (simultaneously witnessing the duration of the performance). So I chose to use the technology as my medium and space.
Gradually coming to understand technology and audio-visual media helped me realize the desire of the audience to see the un-edited aspect of the artist’s life, and since my practice is heavily inspired from everyday life, I found I could create more impact if I talked about everyday life in an everyday setting, a setting that was not staged but rather functioned like any other regular household.
JW: Let’s talk about moving. As someone who has traveled all over the U.S. and India to create community-based art and, meanwhile, moved homes quite a lot, are there parts of your workspace you consider portable, that go with you wherever you go?
MJ: I want to carry my whole home with me. All the little things I have collected over years, all my artworks I deem very dear to me. I want to carry all of it. However when I moved to the U.S., I carried the strangest of things, like raw cotton thread, colored ribbons, tubes of paints, handcrafted mica-paper, some of my drawing samples, an old sari of my mother that I had already started to weave with. I think I believed these things would not be available in the U.S., and I carried them with me. Though I do not fear a new start. I am open to challenges posed by life (and scarcity of resources).
Aliens Green Dream (2018). fabric and wood.
JW: Was there ever a time and place that felt wholly unique, and the experience of working in that space cannot be reproduced again?
MJ: When I was pregnant, I moved to St. Louis. It was a strangely liberating time for me in the sense that I have acute fear of being left alone. However, during my pregnancy, I overcame this fear with the realization that I was never alone. My whole energy got concentrated on my creative expression of this confidence as an artist. I threw myself into experimenting with materials, forms and got highly ambitious in scale of my work. I was a student, a teaching assistant, a community artist, and a pregnant woman. With a dedicated studio space just to myself, with wood, ceramic, and metal workshops, mentors, visiting artists and critics, and studio managers willing to help me learn new skills, I was in the most amazing phase of my life. I created works with fabric, wood, silicon, foam, resin, glass, and ceramic, along with digital and text-based performances on a scale of 10x10 feet roughly. That phase of life as a woman, artist, and student was unique and can never be reproduced again.
JW: During that time when you were at a crossroads with all these identities—student, teacher, community artist, and pregnant woman—were there people you looked to, who you felt spoke to your particular experience, either because they were making art about these or similar conditions, or because something about their practice was particularly conducive to expressing their multiple identities?
MJ: I gleaned different elements from a diverse range of artists. I was continuously referring to artists who have discussed personally instigated issues in global (if I may say so) visual forms. Do Ho Suh’s architectural installations made with synthetic fabric and his use of miniature human forms helped me conceptualize personal issues in political contexts. Nick Cave’s Sound Suits and Antony Gormley’s human forms were very influential pieces for my Aliens Dream Green (2018). Abdoulaye Konate’s use of fabric as economic commentary and Yinka Shonibare’s idea of identity, Nicholas Hlobo’s incorporation of sculpture, performance, Anish Kapoor and Olafur Eliasson’s immersive installations were some other sources of inspiration.
Yayoi Kusama’s repetitive use of simple forms like spots, Ai Wei Wei’s Kui Hua Zi (Sunflower Seeds), Bharti Kher’s use of bindi (decorative stickers for the forehead) were again very important for my process and work that followed fractal patterns and impressed upon the power of repetition. Marina and Ulay, Tehching Hsieh and Rirkrit Tiravanija’s performances based on everyday life and activities shaped the 365 Days Mee & Jey collaborative video series (2019).
Edger Heap of Birds’s visit to my studio was another very precious time for me as it helped me understand the power of text, minimalist forms, and presentation of work to evoke empathy. This especially was important for conceptualizing the PRAYER (MY BABY) performance piece.
I incorporate all the available inputs with my choice of using eco-friendly materials and repurposing resources to create sustainable art works. This is a very important aspect of my life philosophy as a human and artist. That perhaps is one reason why I stick to using non-toxic and biodegradable materials primarily until such materials become quintessential for the final product, as well as why I have been engaging with virtual space very prominently in my practice since 2013. A sensible approach to resources that would ensure a better future for the younger generation.
JW: Speaking of the younger generation, I understand you have your hands full with an active toddler these days. Thank you for taking the time to talk, and here’s to another not-so-ordinary day.