The multidisciplinary, installation-based work of Swiss artist Mai Thu Perret is primarily influenced by her fictional written work, The Crystal Frontier, which the artist has been writing since 1999. The narrative details the lives of a group of women who form a commune called New Ponderosa Year Zero in the New Mexican desert. Integrating feminist politics with art historical reference, craft and textile, Perret creates various literary and visual structures for her own creative explorations of the world, and all of the many social systems that inhabit it.

Mai-Thu Perret has had solo exhibitions including Kunsthaus Aarau, Mamco, Geneva, Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich, Le Magasin, Grenoble, Swiss Institute–Contemporary Art, New York, University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, The Aspen Art Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Kitchen, New York, The Renaissance Society, Chicago. Group exhibitions include Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris, Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan State University, East Lansing and Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, CCS Bard Hessel Museum, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, Kunsthalle Bern, Haus der Kunst, Munich. She was awarded both the 2011 Zurich Art Prize and le Prix Culturel Manor and took part in ILLUMInations at the 54th Venice Biennale.