A League of Their Own: Conversation with Mai-Thu Perret

For the past 15 years, Swiss artist Mai-Thu Perret has been building on the ongoing project “Crystal Frontier” (1999– ), based on a multidisciplinary narrative about a group of women who move away from mainstream society to create a feminist commune, called New Ponderosa Year Zero, in the desert of southwest New Mexico. Inspired by various selections of literature, the fiction behind “Crystal Frontier” has resulted in a multitude of ephemera—from letters and diary entries to ceramics, textiles and furniture—that chronicle the women’s experiences in their colony. Over a cup of hot water, Perret’s preferred drink of choice, ArtAsiaPacific sat down with the artist before her debut at Simon Lee Gallery, Hong Kong, to talk about the notion of utopia, her latest work inspired by Enzo Mari—one of the great Italian designers of the late 20th century—and the current state of “Crystal Frontier.”