Mimi O Chun: It’s all cake

Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art
September 4, 2021 – January 23, 2022
Curated by Lauren R. O’Connell

Installation views of Mimi O Chun: It’s all cake at Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art. Photography by Claire A. Warden.

short film

A behind-the-scenes film featuring artist Mimi O Chun in the studio creating new works for her exhibition Mimi O Chun: It's all cake at SMoCA. By Christian Bruno and Natalija Vekic of Electric Park Films.

Works in Exhibition

Mimi O Chun: It’s all cake

Lauren R. O’Connell, Curator of Contemporary Art

New York-based artist Mimi O Chun’s first solo museum exhibition presents all-new soft sculptures produced over the past year and a half—a time marked by the global COVID-19 pandemic, a polarized political climate, and a civil uprising for racial justice. Chun explains that “these cultural, political, and economic winds formed a perfect storm that have exposed and exacerbated the structural inequities of a late capitalist economy.” The soft sculptures in Mimi O Chun: It’s all cake prompt viewers to reexamine the reality of this time, reckoning with illusions influenced by popular culture and consumerism. For example, the plush sculpture Prime Hermit (2021) is a handmade version of a single-use delivery envelope—white with bright blue text and a yellow sticker—that once held an item ordered from Amazon. Inside the discarded package is a stuffed coral-colored hermit crab peeking out from its repurposed home. The sculpture is simultaneously adorable and disturbing as it points to human consumption and its effect on the natural environment. One might find a sympathetic connection with the hermit crab when considering the way in which the COVID-19 pandemic required us to seek shelter and use online ordering to avoid interactions with others.

The title, It’s all cake, speaks to the excess of physical goods, entertainment, and news headlines that we are conditioned to consume online. In the limitless world of the Internet, flashy personalized ads lead to impulse purchases and viral videos distract from the profound issues facing our world today. For example, enter “illusion cake”—cakes made to look like everyday objects—into any search engine and one will find endless images, videos, and blogs dedicated to this obscure genre. One could get lost watching the satisfying, and often unsettling, videos of knives slicing into common items, like a toilet paper roll, to reveal the soft fluffy inside. It’s all cake! Not unlike Queen Marie Antoinette in 18th century France, who infamously stated “let them eat cake” in response to the famine and political unrest amongst her people, which led to the French Revolution and ultimately her execution. Moments in history where political leaders distance their ideologies from the reality of their constituents feels strangely familiar in 21st century United States. At the beginning of 2020, political leaders intentionally diverted attention from serious issues, such as the spread of the coronavirus and racial injustice, and redirected it toward mistrust of the news (fake news), among other things. If Marie Antoinette were around today, she might proclaim “let them watch illusion cake memes” distracting from the crucial topics of our time and making way for illusion to rule.

Illusion can be a deceptive appearance or a false belief. When applied to foundations that form our society, illusions are dangerous. Two works in the exhibition, although attractive in appearance, express some of society’s most recent pitfalls. Over the past year and a half, videos taken on phones, surveillance cameras, and police body cameras have given way to a new form of social awareness. Chun’s wearable sculpture Body Armor Backpack, Keep It Cute Edition™ (2021) integrates a backpack with an oversized ring light and smartphone to envision a body camera for civilians. This work acknowledges the need for accountability as we saw in recent videos such as Darnella Frazier’s phone recording of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck, or security footage of building staff closing the entrance door while a vicious attack on Filipino American senior Vilma Kari occurred feet from the building’s entrance. Considering the large amount of hate crimes in the country, these recordings act as evidence against the illusion of equality. Speaking to another source of misconception is the sculpture Qabal (2021) that cleverly references the pervasive influence of QAnon—a far-right conspiracy theory about liberal politicians forming a cabal of Satan worship and child sex-trafficking. Hanging on the wall is a replica of mylar balloons that read “You are the news now,” quoting a haunting phrase circulated by QAnon to embolden individuals to use their social media platforms to promote the scheme. Underneath sits a circle of adorable stuffed rabbits, implying the echo chamber created by conspiracy message boards and the unsubstantiated child sex-trafficking ring at the center of the plot.

Chun informs her artwork by cleverly dissecting visuals and conceptual information gathered from the news and social media, as well as pulling from theories of late capitalism and art history. While late capitalism is a term that has been around since the beginning of the 20th century, it more recently lends itself to the contradictions and inequalities that define many modern business practices. Chun’s oversized sculpture Museum of Oat Dreams (for One) (2020) highlights such companies that find success and economic footholds through promoting opposing ideologies. Immersive pop-up experiences like Color Factory and Museum of Ice Cream have gained extreme popularity by calling themselves museums—institutions that cultivate historical and cultural interests—yet provide void environments that are most valuable as backdrops for selfies shared on social media. While the work is inspired by Museum of Ice Cream's sprinkle pools, Chun chose to feature a spilled carton of the vegan milk substitute Oatly. The Swedish company is founded on ideas of environmental sustainability and human health, but the paradox of the brand is its major investor Blackstone, which has been directly linked to deforestation and extreme right-wing politics.

The body of work in this exhibition links Chun to artists whose work addresses art as commodity, such as Marcel Duchamp and the movement Fluxus, and those who made soft sculpture a major element of their practice. Like Chun, American artist Claes Oldenburg employed both. Known for his oversized sculptures, Oldenburg uses parody to comment on the absurdity of commerce—especially the market value of art versus common objects. In his 1961 environmental installation The Store, Oldenburg opened a shop in his New York neighborhood and filled its shelves with reproductions of food and trinkets. Often oversized and made of cloth and plaster, the artist sold the unusual artworks for varying prices outside of the traditional gallery setting. Subsequently to The Store, Oldenburg began making large soft sculptures of popular foods—hamburgers and cakes—and household objects—toilets—that critiqued American mass culture and its obsession with the body. In Chun’s practice, the artist uses not only the replication of objects, but also ideas and situations to scrutinize the things we uncritically accept within consumer culture.

Chun’s soft sculptures are ironic mash-ups of familiar objects—breads on a stool, mylar balloons quoting political rhetoric, and drones transporting pigeons—made from thread, fabric, and structural material. At first approach, the soft colorful works are extremely pleasing to the eye, eliciting the feeling of want so common in society’s obsession with the acquisition of goods. Yet, here lies the poignancy of Chun’s works—they are simultaneously accessible and critical, offering a skewed take on that which we are taught to trust by participating in consumerism. Presenting works that mix fantasy with cynicism, Chun offers agency to question the values that we collectively adopt and perpetuate. The complexity of this inquiry considers how reality is constructed through layers of information that are absorbed explicitly and subliminally every day through technological devices in the palms of our hands. The resulting works offer a revelation of the playful, absurd, and even dark messages underlying commerce, culture, and politics.

Artist biography