James Kao

Lives and works in Berkeley, CA, USA

Artist statement

My art lies in the moment of interaction between the viewer and the work when the viewer realizes what they see was not what they initially expected. I create graphic entities and narrative concepts that explore and present these ideas in an encoded and sometimes nonsensical way. I am inspired by the ideas relating to identities (self and others, including sexuality), interpersonal relationships, sociological / political / historical / anthropological contexts, totems and historical figurines, death and afterlife, and characterizations and cartoon (including Japanese character culture). I combine abstraction and surrealism with these graphic entities and narrative concepts. One form of this expression is the “character” drawings, where I use ink strokes inspired by the eight basic strokes of the textual characters in Mandarin to draw the graphic entities I invented. The word “character” in English are defined as: features that make up and distinguish an individual, one of the persons of a drama, and/or a graphic symbol used in writing; I seek to combine them all in a character drawing. I have also created a pattern titled “Skullscape,” which is a tessellation of geometric color shapes where each shape is an abstraction of the human skull; the top part of each shape is wider than the bottom part, and the shape is symmetrical. The material of paper plays a role in my recent work. I draw large scale ink characters on paper, which is transportable, organic, and encompassing of...

Artwork