MAI LA THAI
ARTIST BIO
Mai La Thai is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist, designer, art director, and photographer, known for her abstract Light Series photography, which experiments with light, liquid, and color. She works with traditional and digital media, including paint, pencil, and ink. Having begun her artistic journey as a teenager, Mai has earned numerous accolades throughout her career, including first place in the 2019 PDN Photo Annual and three Honoree titles at the Webby Awards for her innovative short films. She holds a BFA from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. Mai’s creative journey has been featured in Forbes, and she collaborated as the photographer for a story that earned Editor’s Pick recognition for its coverage of U-2 flight training. Her work has shown nationally and internationally in juried festivals and galleries, as well as select museums. Based in New York City, Mai continues to explore and push creative boundaries.
GENERAL ARTIST STATEMENT
The war in Southeast Asia had just ended when I was born. I was around 2 or 3 when we escaped on a wooden boat. I have vivid memories of those experiences. These are what I consider my first photographs. We landed at a refugee camp in Malaysia. I looked out to the horizon quite often for those 13 months. Something was happening to us, but I couldn't be sure what.
It was a bewildering combination of darkness and light; of the ethereal and the ephemeral. My innocence and naiveté had me focus on the immediate world around me. Anything else left to my imagination. Everything was worth looking at and meditating on. The beetles, the sand, the tarp, the moon, the strangers, the waves, and the vast and infinite blue sea beyond the shore. What was beyond that horizon needed to be discovered and explored, even if it was the most mundane thing. Later, I also found inspiration from various environments in the west and influences from music, literature, movies, technology, space, and the sciences. Today, I continue to investigate and explore new ways of visualizing various concepts and themes. I don't always choose my medium, my medium chooses me.
As Hemingway once said, "I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There are seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows." This viewpoint is also how I like to approach my work.