Chai Mi
A’s Fables, Whose Fables?
From "rewriting Images" to "retelling stories", Chai Mi invites audiences to explore greater freedom in how we see and how we tell.
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
A’s Fables, Whose Fables?, a solo exhibition by artist Chai Mi, is on view from 16 January to 8 March 2026 at Fotografiska Shanghai. The exhibition traces Chai Mi’s practice over the past decade—moving from what she calls an “Archaeology of Images” toward a reconstructed “Fable Narration”—inviting audiences to explore greater freedom in how we see and how we tell.
Since 2015, Chai Mi has visited zoos in various cities, treating them as sites where watching relations between humans and animals unfold. Through handwriting, overpainting, printing, and scanning, she “rewrites” existing images, imprinting them with traces of time and personal gesture. Recurring “black bars” in her work—inspired by Roland Barthes’ concept of the Punctum—create a visual window that obscures part of the picture while suggesting that the animals under gaze might be looking back through it toward a world beyond ours.
Beginning in 2018, Chai Mi returned to Aesop’s Fables, collaging and weaving gathered images and texts into her A’s Fables series. These works break from conventional narrative logic, encouraging viewers to step out of the observer’s position and feel connections across life forms through the interplay of image and parable. If A’s Fables represents a calm rethinking of narrative structure, her latest video work, I Forgot but You Can Remember, shifts toward a more intimate and poetic register. Using cut paper, collage, and stop‑motion animation, the piece follows the perspective of a stray dog she adopted, interwoven with murmurs from letters to her daughter—gently opening a dreamscape that belongs to another.
The exhibition brings together two parallel strands in Chai Mi’s practice: a rational reconstruction of image and narrative, and a tender writing of life and memory. Walking among rewritten fables, reassembled images, and poetic video, viewers are invited to reconsider how we look, how we tell, and how, through retelling, we might arrive at greater freedom and understanding.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Chai Mi (b. 1985) works across moving image, photography, painting, installation, text, and performance. Her practice revolves around bodily experience, archival research, and a kind of conceptual and geographic nomadism, often uncovering visible clues and hidden relationships in everyday life to reveal their ambiguity and fluidity. She focuses on the dilemmas of individuals or groups across different times and spaces, exploring the connections between objects, living beings, and consciousness, while questioning fixed concepts and established norms. Her recent work reflects on the tensions between emerging values and civilizational heritage in an age of rapid technological development. She is also interested in hybrid forms of interaction between humans, human-made artifacts, and other species, and how these entanglements may enable modes of coexistence in the present and the future.
Her solo exhibitions include A’s Fables, Whose Fables? (Fotografiska Shanghai, 2026); When the Sparrow Quieted Down in the Hole (aaa*bkdq + Imaginary Z，Hangzhou, 2025); The Stars Outshine the Moon (Gallery Where, Beijing, 2024); Space‑Time Illusion (California College of the Arts, Los Angeles, 2019); Between Square and Round (Centre Intermondes, La Rochelle, France, 2016); and Test Field (La Bande Vidéo, Québec, Canada, 2013). Her works has also been shown at the 1st Diriyah Biennale (Saudi Arabia), UCCA Lab (Beijing), Three Shadows Photography Art Centre (Beijing), Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai Zendai Himalayas Art Center, Chengdu Art Museum, OCAT Shenzhen, Museo de la Cancillería (Mexico), and Donggang Museum of Photography (Korea), among others.