In her solo exhibition at The Frame Gallery, on view March 28-30, 2025, Mimi Chuang explores sustainability, interactivity, and climate action through playful print media.
How did climate change become central to your art practice?
Starting sophomore year, I took Imin Yeh’s publishing course and Kellie Hames’ printmaking course. So I got really into interactive print media. I was interested in making work that the audience could put a piece of themselves into and how that experience changes the value the work holds. Most of my work now is geared toward climate change action and sustainability communication. It feels like something that’s polarized, pessimistic, and hopeless, so I wanted to use a medium that was happy and silly to bring these conversations into a new light. I love to make art that creates conversations about how we can shift the way we think about climate change to be a more helpful endeavor.
What role does sustainability play in the materials you use?
I definitely have to reconcile with the fact that, as an artist, if I consider the sustainability of the practice itself, so often it can stop me from making anything at all. It’s something that I try to be aware of. I have a piece called Fernando where I wanted to quantify the amount of waste I created, and I created him using only scrap fabric. Working in the CMU print shop, all the trash disappears every day, so I really see how in our product system, it can feel like nothing will ever be used up. I have another print exercise that’s all scrap acetate that I found in the bins, and it’s all pre-mixed ink that’s already been used. Especially being an art student, I don’t like paying for paper, so I’ll just find everything that I can.
Why did you ask visitors to bring trash with them to the opening?
I took an environmental systems course last semester that emphasized the three Rs: reduce your overall consumption, try to reuse everything that you can, and then recycle. So it’s flipped from the way that we typically consider “recycle, reduce, reuse.” I made a little zine called Meeko that follows these two characters on a walk. You help them along by repurposing things originally considered waste and collaging them into the book. It’s a silly exercise, but I thought it’d be funny to get people to start thinking about how they can reuse waste as other things.
What characters or motifs reoccur throughout your work?
An interesting one that has come up, kind of subconsciously, is bugs or bug-like objects. Pupa is the first comic I ever wrote last summer, because I was doing an internship in Pittsburgh, and in my kitchen there was always a fly because of the heat. Growing up in California, I didn’t experience humid, warm summers with bugs everywhere, or being trapped in the car with a mosquito that keeps biting you. So I wanted to take a step back and explore why I think about things the way that I do, and what that means about how I care about things around me.
How did you choose the title “Sunspot” for your show?
I wanted it to be about cyclical thinking, but I didn’t want it to be like an academic discussion. I thought it was funny that sunspot can mean so many things — a little freckle from the sun, or it can mean like the sun literally exploding. My titles are usually not too serious.
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