artist statement

I make work that responds to the moment: sculptures intended to expose the absurdities of an unchecked capitalist agenda. I recreate and recast everyday objects to reveal how corporations manufacture desire, monetizing our most basic instincts toward identity, social status, and well-being.

I spent my early career designing brands and products for growth-at-all-cost corporations, and saw firsthand how blind tech optimism and exploitative labor practices widen the wealth gap, push the environment past its limits, and make policy vulnerable to undue influence. The harms were never hidden, but my livelihood (like so many others’) depended on participation. This is the work that complicity eventually demanded.

A ruthlessly capitalist system designs desire, manufactures need, and engineers the very appetites it then claims to serve. The machinery has sharpened: algorithmic acceleration, lobbying that trades policy for profit, the deliberate construction of dependency. Against this backdrop, my work is stubbornly, deliberately slow: created by hand, at the pace that making demands, in refusal of a system that treats speed and scale as virtue. It asks who benefits from the distraction, and at what cost.

Biography

Mimi O Chun is an artist whose soft sculptures reveal the ironies and inequities inherent to a late-capitalist economy. She re-contextualizes iconography borrowed from consumerist culture to create works that vacillate between parody and pastiche — embodying Horace’s conviction that “artful ridicule can address contentious issues more competently and vigorously than severity alone.” Mimi works primarily in fabric, incorporating finishing techniques such as appliqué and embroidery to render objects in painstaking detail.

Mimi earned her Bachelor of Fine Art from Carnegie Mellon University and her Master of Fine Art from Yale School of Art. Her work has been published by Fast Company, Bon Appétit, White Zinfandel, Gather Journal, Makeshift magazine, and Princeton Architectural Press. Her first solo museum exhibition, Mimi O Chun: It’s all cake, was held at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art from 2021-2022. Mimi lives and works in New York City.