Mimi Biyao Bai

Mimi Biyao Bai was born in Xi'an, China and is based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work explores how the cultural fantasies we have inherited about assimilation, labor, safety, and survival both confirm and contradict our lived realities. Incorporating research into Westerns and action films, fungi, camouflage, and doomsday preppers, Bai's project asks what does it mean to be prepared? How are representations of safety and survival centered around the individual rather than the collective or the structural? What are alternative modes of survival, adaptation, and creation?