Mai Ta: the sins of others
Pablo's Birthday is pleased to present the sins of others, a solo exhibition by Mai Ta. Working within the realm of the surreal and psychological, Ta constructs intimate, unsettled spaces in which family history, inherited memory, and the boundary between the interior and exterior collapse. Small, barren rooms open onto nocturnal gardens; doors remain ajar; graves dug open; somewhere along the horizon, thunder struck. Rendered in delicate tones and a cool, dark palette, these scenes resist a fixed narrative. Instead, they suggest the fragmentary nature of memory—what is remembered, what is forgotten, and what is left unsaid.
For Ta, memory is transmitted not only through stories but through silences, gaps, and absences. One’s private history is shaped by what one chooses to reveal, as much as by what one refuses to acknowledge. Yet personal memories are often saturated with the history that precedes us. The experience of inheritance therefore becomes inseparable from questions of responsibility: What belongs to the individual, and what has been carried forward from those who came before? Family history is never entirely private; and for Mai Ta, in Vietnam, it is entangled with the larger history of war, displacement, colonization, and loss.
This uncertainty forms the tension at the center of the sins of others. In confronting personal and family history through painting, Ta negotiates the unstable space between these silences, gaps, and absences. The private secret can become an open secret; what has been collectively understood but privately withheld can surface through image, symbol, and suggestion. A painting once hung on a wall, a broken branch or sculpture, a bed slept in: objects and spaces become vessels for histories that cannot be fully articulated.
At stake, ultimately, is not the recovery of a complete or authoritative history, but the act of approaching one. Ta’s paintings inhabit a state of constant becoming, where memory is continually shed, reconstructed. Here, painting becomes a space in which individual and collective histories can coexist without being reconciled: loss alongside renewal, intimacy alongside distance, and personal memory alongside the memory of others. The question remains unresolved—when we speak of what came before us, are we speaking for ourselves, or for an other?
