Love Songs by Yeni Mao
Sargent’s Daughters is delighted to present Love Songs, a solo exhibition by Mexico City–based sculptor Yeni Mao (b. 1971, Canada), presented concurrently at the gallery and at Frieze New York 2026. Marking Mao’s and Sargent’s Daughters’ Frieze New York debut, the exhibition brings together a constellation of recent sculptures that explore the relationship between the body, architecture, and industrial systems.
Mao’s cyborg-like assemblages cradle found and bronze-cast objects within nickel-plated steel armatures, creating forms that exist somewhere between bodies, machines, and architectural structures. Suspended from the ceiling or positioned close to the floor, the sculptures appear to emerge from and inhabit their surroundings. Each work begins with a central object—a stone or fragment of glass collected by the artist, articulated ceramic forms, or delicately cast cow tongues—which Mao encloses within a custom-built steel framework. The armature functions at once as a support, a protective structure, and an animated extension of the object it contains. Nickel plating gives the steel a reflective, almost seductive surface, while grinding marks, welds, and seams retain evidence of the artist’s hand.
Although the sculptures draw on the language and technologies of industrial production, they are fabricated by Mao in his Mexico City studio, informed by his experience working in foundries and architectural trades. This tension between the industrial and the handmade is central to the work. Steel, machinery, and systems of production become intertwined with flesh, desire, and vulnerability, transforming the hard logic of industrial construction into something strangely intimate.
The sculptures also implicate the viewer physically. Their scale and placement require bodies to move around, beneath, and sometimes into them—avoiding sharp protrusions, crouching to look into concealed spaces, and encountering reflections of themselves in the polished metal. In this encounter, the body becomes another constructed system, mirroring the sculptures’ own hybrid anatomy. Mao suggests that identity, like architecture and machinery, is something assembled, shaped, and continually negotiated.
Across Love Songs, control and surrender remain in constant tension. The rigid steel armatures contain and organize their fragile or organic contents, while the objects resist complete containment. What initially appears mechanical becomes sensual; what seems protective can also feel constraining. Through this ambiguity, Mao’s sculptures collapse the distance between flesh and industry, inviting us not only to confront the machine, but to desire it.
May 2026
