Cato Ouyang

Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, USA

Artist statement

My practice engages object-making, interdisciplinary environments, and time-based projects. My hands-on approach to materiality is accompanied by a research practice focused on myth, history, literature, philosophy, and poetry. I address how a subject orients in physical space and sociopolitical space: what discourses are inscribed on the body? How does it exist in contingency with architecture and bureaucratic structures? Through abstraction and fragmentation of the figure, I propose the body as a politicized landscape. The included work samples represent my examinations of historical formation, gender and power, and the fraught politics of representation. My work over the last two years has involved sculpture, conceptual gestures, performance, music, writing, and filmmaking. In these projects, I respond to my experience as a precariously-(self-)employed, marginalized immigrant subject, as contextualized by affect theorists like Lauren Berlant and Sara Ahmed. I use a wide range of material approaches including carving, hand-molding, assemblage, casting, and drawing to interrogate the psychosomatic links between trauma, memory, and the body. Working almost entirely by hand, I engage figuration to give form to the contours of psychological space. Often figures hide their faces, appropriating anonymity as a means of self-definition, recalling Edouard Glissant: “We demand the right to opacity.” The postures of my figurative works also allude to Gilles Deleuze's reimaging of...

Artwork