Statement
Timothy Bair is a Taiwanese American artist whose practice exists at the intersection of autobiography and collective history, exploring issues of cultural pedagogy through the media of drawing, painting, and sculpture. The process and imagery in Bair’s work are catalyzed by the atmospheric biases that often arise from his experiences navigating his surroundings as a person with a disability. The counteracting use of colors, forms, and subject matters in his work examine how our collective knowledge is developed,interrogating manners of indoctrination within imagery, tradition, and folklore.
“We must have been evil-doers in our previous lives,”—my parents would say, to fulfill their need to rationalize my disability. I grew up in a conservative household with deeply ingrained traditional Asian cultural sentiments, and a family that was unable to accept my condition. I was often made to hide my disability and explain it away as a temporary condition, the result of an accident—but it was not. I have SMA, a rare neuromuscular disease that slowly weakens my muscles over time. “It means bad luck for the family,” was the refrain under our roof. My parents, hiding my genetic disorder from anyone outside of the family to protect my brother’s future matchmaking prospects, were always equipped with a reason for the wheelchair: an injury from a rough game of basketball, a fall down a flight of stairs as an infant, or a careless sprint across the street on a red light.
These experiences form the basis for my work, in which I investigate systems of indoctrination, tradition, and my identity as a disabled person. My most recent body of work, Bedtime Stories, focuses on the Taiwanese folk stories I heard my parents tell as I was growing up—stories that I have dissected and held parallel to my lived experiences in my drawings. I examine my upbringing and identity through a mixture of autobiography and cultural pedagogy, such as in I Stand No Chance of Growing Up, where I interrogate traditional Taiwanese customs regarding discrimination and arranged marriages, in which people are taught to “date their own kind.” With the piece, I pose the questions: What about me? Am I to search for someone in a wheelchair as well? Is that how my cultural similarities are defined? Through my practice, I unpack preconceived notions of what it means to be a disabled artist—preconceptions that I hold, and that I’m met with in others.
Disability: Spinal Muscular Atrophy Type III
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