Drawing from her background in anthropology, Maia Chao often approaches art with an observation, then a question: Where does the art in doctors’ offices come from? How do you make a living as an artist? Building on these inquiries, often through mimicry or replication, leads to works that can make the mundane feel absurd, beautiful, or troubling.
So it was with filler words. In the 2016 audio work Hesitation Particles,Chao interviewed native speakers of 31 different languages to collect samples of “hesitation particles”––used in most languages to mark a pause or hesitation in speech, as with “um” in English. Chao’s resulting composition is atmospheric—like being immersed in a crowd of global strangers deep in thought. Another project, “A Picture of Health (2022),” began with the weird art in a doctor’s office. After a particularly excruciating three-hour stay in a waiting room, where she stared at a landscape painting––“arguably one of the longest times I’ve contemplated a single work of art,” she told me––she staged an exhibition of paintings borrowed from the offices of 27 local healthcare providers at Vox Populi Gallery in Philadelphia. Chao replaced the originals with monochromatic canvases, thus staging two simultaneous painting exhibitions; what you saw depended on where you went to see art.
Maia Chao: A Picture of Health, 2022.
Courtesy Maia Chao
Chao reserves an especially curious gaze for the art world. For “Look at Art. Get Paid. (2015–20),” Chao, working with collaborator Josephine Devanbu, invited people who don’t normally visit art museums as paid guest critics. First piloted at the RISD Museum, the project has since been adapted to several other institutions. She’s worked with over 200 respondents and 41 paid guest critics, addressing the fact that while museums receive public funds, 90 percent of museumgoers are still overwhelmingly wealthy and white. In her 2021 video The Performance of Making Art, Chao cheekily documents the material conditions––the cost of the car, the honorarium, the education––that allow her to make the very video we watch.
Fusing the bureaucratic and the absurd is Chao’s hallmark. Her other throughline is labor, especially the ways neoliberalism has colonized our culture, our time, and our bodies. In American Idle (2025), commissioned by Times Square Arts, Chao collaborated with choreographer Lena Engelstein to produce an hourlong movement piece. Surrounded by Times Square’s spectacular advertisements, Chao’s performers seemed stuck in small, repetitive movements: cooling oneself with a shirt, taking a selfie, eating a bag of chips. Chao drew the actions from observing tourists in Times Square, but also from the looped gestures of 3D figures in crowd simulation software: an uncanniness heightened by the fact that each performer was doubled via an identically dressed doppelgänger. Eventually, the performers count down to a new year that never arrives; some of the doppelgängers kiss, or sob.
Chao’s most recent commission, a performance for the 2026 Whitney Biennial, involves a wandering live museum performance, crafting a libretto from recorded sound bites of her friends exploring the museum. “I don’t really like inventing material out of nowhere; I prefer to find scripts or language,” she explains. The piece emphasizes the more bodily aspects of being at a museum––using the restroom, needing a place to sit, being hungry––and also dresses down the institution by drawing attention to the museum’s whimsically named Replication Committee. Through Chao’s eyes, banality denatures—so much so that occasionally, contemporary existence inspires incredulity and we glimpse other ways of being.
