Timothy Bair
“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. I examine my upbringing and identity through a mixture of autobiography and cultural pedagogy. 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. In my early life of pursuing art, I was shunned by teachers due to my inability to stabilize a calligraphy brush for Chinese ink paintings. I was asked, “how many artists in a wheelchair can you name?” a question meant to dissuade me from pursuing the arts. Despite understanding the barriers I might face, I have invariably found ways to work in collaboration with my biological programming in pursuit of the arts. Now, through intentionally ornate details, I use a method of delineation in my works as direct reference to how tremorous my hands are due to my neuromuscular condition—and a testament to my identity.
Timothy Bair (b. Taichung, 1996) 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 is catalyzed by the atmospheric biases that often arise from his experiences navigating his surroundings as a person with a disability.
