Antonia Kuo’s practice centers around recording, image-making, and the potential of the photographic medium. Kuo creates her own intensive processes by which images and materials can be alchemically transformed. She often merges formal elements based on industrial materials and machine parts with intuitively-derived natural forms and gestures. In her unique “photochemical paintings” she utilizes light-sensitive paper and photochemistry to capture light, time and mark making, collapsing her drawing and painting practice with photographic materiality. Compound images are built up over multiple layers and remain tethered to some markers of representation, but ultimately coalesce into an interpretative field of entropic energies and phenomena. Like her photochemical works, Kuo’s sculptures serve as recordings of forms that are lost, obscured, and only partially remembered.
Antonia Kuo (b. 1987, New York, NY) lives and works in New York, NY. She received an MFA from Yale University in 2018, her BFA from School of Fine Arts Boston and Tufts University in 2009, and a one-year certificate from the School of the International Center of Photography in 2013. In 2024 Kuo had a two-person exhibition with Martin Wong at the Frye Art Museum, Seattle. Her work has been exhibited at Metropolitan Museum of Manila, PH; Project Native Informant, London; Mountains, Berlin; Chapter NY, New York; Moskowitz Bayse, Los Angeles; Harper’s Gallery, New York; Jack Barrett Gallery, New York; F, Houston; Chart, New York; Each Modern, Taipei; MAMOTH, London; Make Room, Los Angeles; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Rubber Factory, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; among others. Kuo has performed and screened her work at Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY; Knockdown Center, Queens, NY; MoMA PS1, Queens, NY; and the Musee d’art contemporain de Montreal, among others. She has been an artist-in-residence at Mass MoCA, Vermont Studio Center, The Banff Centre, and was a MacDowell Colony Fellow. Kuo’s work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and Centre Pompidou, Paris.
