About
G. J. “Ray” Mak b. 1979 grew up in Westchester County, NY, and has lived in New York City, Baltimore, Chicago, and Beijing, working as an artist, cultural critic, and cook. From his many years as a cake decorator and his time as an editor for an English-language magazine in China, to his time touring in a doom metal band and performing in experimental theater groups, the many disciplines he has tackled and the various idioms in which he has worked form a Gordian Knot in his practice. The vast shifts he has witnessed in society and the disparate cultural loyalties he has felt in his lifetime have warped his psyche, which at times seems to be a fractal flowering of dialectical churning, fueled by the all-encompassing spectacle of contemporary life and the inescapable paranoia of our times. Mak aims to reflect upon and transcend the contradictions of self that arise through intersecting yet opposing personal identities vying for supremacy in his increasingly noisy mind.