Artist Soile Yli-Mäyry’s conquest of Asia started from Japan

“A work of art is an artist’s best agent.”

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By Merja Ojansivu
     
      Soile Yli-Mäyry looks not unlike a musketeer preparing for a duel: a red leather outfit with epaulettes, black high-heel leather boots, and a long black pigtail.
      “This is where the passport goes, the credit cards fit in here, and this one is for a small sketchbook”, Yli-Mäyry demonstrates the variously-sized pockets of her travel jacket.
     
The artist is no stranger to travelling. Yli-Mäyry is one of Finland’s internationally most successful artists.
      Even on the day of the interview she is in the starting blocks - so to speak – getting ready to dash off to yet another opening of an exhibition, this time in Japan, followed by a working trip to Venice.
      In the Berengo Gallery on the Island of Murano in the Venetian Lagoon, Yli-Mäyry’s colourful, massive glass sculptures and totems take shape.
      During the summer months these pieces of work called “Uniruukku” (“Dream Pot”) can be seen at the Taidehalli gallery of the artist’s childhood home village of Mäyry in Kuortane.
     
Yli-Mäyry is well aware that she will always carry the brand of her unusual childhood. She was born of deaf parents, whose mother tongue was sign language.
      "My childhood has benefited me a lot when I’m abroad. Even at home it was like I was abroad, and we always hit a wall whenever we left the house.”
      In the Yli-Mäyry farming family, the children used sign language to act as interpreters for their parents, and when necessary they deftly censored some of the maliciousness and mockery.
      “I became an observer and an expert on people. It is pretty difficult to dupe me.”
      The lonely and isolated-looking characters in Yli-Mäyry’s paintings have been well-received in the crowded metropolises of the East.
      “My work is based on intuition, as is Asian art.”
     
Born sixty years ago today in Kuortane, Yli-Mäyry studied art in Stuttgart from 1972-75 and also took a political science degree from the University of Helsinki in 1995.
      Since 1975, she has held 255 private exhibitions in 25 different countries.
     
In Yli-Mäyry’s view in the western world the rationality of art and people has gone so far that people have become alienated even from themselves.
      The artist’s conquest of the Asian arthouses started in Japan in 1989. Next her work was requested in China, Hong Kong, and Singapore.
      “It is liberating to go to countries where nobody knows anything about me. I am not a pigtailed oddity. It’s all about my art. Either it strikes a nerve with the viewers, or it doesn’t.”
      Large leaps forward in Yli-Mäyry’s career came through the private exhibitions she held every two years between 1997 and 2006 at the Shanghai Art Museum and at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing in 2003 and 2008.
     
When looking at Yli-Mäyry’s art, one cannot help but wonder about her frequent use of triangles.
      Even the artist’s eyewear is triangular in shape.
      “A triangle is a prime shape. It combines the buttresses of art: wonderment, intuition, and joy. A triangle is the friction from which art originates. A circle is too beautiful to be liveable.”
      Yli-Mäyry works almost as a hermit in her studio in the city of Lahti and in the summer in Mäyry in Kuortane.
     
Her calendar is fully booked until 2012: Germany, Paris, Rome, Singapore, Hong Kong, New York, Miami, and Tokyo.
      But there is no sign of stress.
      “I have made it this far alive and well, but it has been a long and rocky road.”
      The bubbly Yli-Mäyry produces speech like someone injected with a gramophone needle, as a man from the Southern Ostrobothnia region once said after having listened to the artist for a little while.
      “My father went to his grave without ever having uttered a word. I speak for him, too.”
     
The artist roundly challenges those that consider Yli-Mäyry’s art too commercial.
      “Well, is it good art that nobody wants to buy?”
      “I am satisfied that I have made it without having to rely on support from the surrounding society.”
      Yli-Mäyry explains that her works of art have made it to the well-known art museums and galleries of the world through other exhibitions.
      The pieces themselves have been by far her best agents.
     
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 14.5.2010


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MERJA OJANSIVU / Helsingin Sanomat