Antonia Kuo

Interview by Drew Zeiba

Antonia Kuo’s second-floor Greenpoint studio, which she shares with her sculptor partner, Douglas Rieger, is labyrinthine, expansive. “It’s been the most functional studio I’ve ever had,” she says. “Pretty much every process that’s part of our respective practices, we’re able to do here ourselves”—except for metal-casting and some ceramics. As this statement suggests, Kuo’s practice is capacious. It’s anchored in complex, patterned compositions made on light-sensitive photo paper, to which she sometimes adds found and sculpted materials—often metal—x-rays, and other media. Increasingly, she also works in free-standing sculpture, creating complex, extraterrestrial-seeming compositions in ceramic and cast metal through a multi-step mold process. These works have been exhibited at galleries and institutions across North America, Asia, and Europe, including her recent notable 2025 solo show at the New York gallery Chapter, “Milk of the Earth.” The exhibition meditated on extraction from bodies and from the earth, sublimating languages of photography, landscape painting, and metallurgy into a disarming installation.

Starting by deeply looking at these richly reactive materials, when I visited Kuo in her studio early this spring following her receiving 2025’s Foundwork Artist Prize, our conversation sprawled into themes like the potency of failure and the urgency of confusion. Throughout her studio are castoffs and cutups—she “hoards” everything, she jokes—which are often recombined and “cannibalized” into subsequent works. Duration is key—the duration of production, the duration of vision, the duration of an object. Imaging time, Kuo’s work incites the viewer to likewise slow themselves and embody their perception in a new, more visceral way.

Drew Zeiba (DZ): Thanks for having me. I was thinking we could talk about some of the things we see happening in the studio, and that will probably spread out into some of the ideas around your practice more generally. So what are we seeing?

Antonia Kuo (AK): We moved my dad out of his house a couple days ago, so this is his chaise. He’s a psychoanalyst.

DZ: I was going to say…

AK: As for the studio, there are a smattering of different things happening here at the moment. Most of the work is on silver gelatin paper, which is a light-sensitive photographic paper that is used more traditionally for black-and-white analog printing in the darkroom. Over a decade ago, I started working with this material and since then I’ve developed it further and further in terms of what it’s capable of. I get all these colors and different tonalities inherent to the paper itself, and then there’s this experimental photochemical processing that is very atypical. It’s very experimental.

DZ: What are some of those experimental processes?

AK: The kind of initial moves are made with photochemistry, so that’s not unusual. It’s mostly developer and fixer, which is used in the darkroom… Have you done any darkroom?

DZ: I mean, superficially a long time ago.

AK: Yeah, I mean most darkrooms are being shut down. So initially, mostly developer and fixer. Usually you develop and then you fix the image, but I’m going between developer and fixer, back and forth, back and forth, to create different tonalities. The photo paper I use is already exposed to light, so, for example, like this roll [Kuo unrolls a large roll of paper leaning near a window], it innately has a quality in itself of the light or the atmosphere…

DZ: You exposed it?

AK: Yeah.

DZ: Where?

AK: I collect a lot of materials and they lie around. Sometimes I lay things on the paper, for example. But this is sort of the raw state of the material. If I were to put this in developer, it would just turn completely black.

DZ: So how do you get from that to all this color and form?

AK: At least in terms of the imagery, it’s very much linked to printmaking processes. There are a lot of ideas about positive and negative and ways of masking a material to create imagery. But I usually translate either from photographs or drawings that I’ve made into these other resists that selectively block the paper from getting hit with the chemistry initially. I also hand paint directly on… Maybe I’ll just point out some things. [Begins indicating parts of a large wall work comprising a series of vertical and horizontal panels.]

These are palm fronds I had laid on the paper. The rest of these blobs are records of painting in acrylic. Then these were from photographs that I had taken. The images become translated through multiple iterations, step by step, and then the chemical process, again, is this major transformation.

I think the biggest shifts since I’ve been working with this material are that I’ve added more and more layers. At first it was just this initial round in the darkroom, and now sometimes it’s two, three, or more passes to transform, transform again, or to bring in more additive color. Some colors are inherent to the paper, but I’ve been going back in painting with different dyes, toners, and pigment to create new colors and color combinations.

Twilight Child, 2025; unique photochemical painting on light-sensitive silver gelatin paper in aluminum frame (4 panels)

DZ: You used the word imagery, and I’m wondering about how you think about your work in relation to image, or pictorialness, especially starting with photographic material and arriving somewhere so abstract. Even with the palm fronds, I’m not sure I would’ve clocked their origin without your pointing it out.

AK: I’m working within the languages of painterly abstraction and thinking about painting. I think all the work sits really uncomfortably between a photograph, a painting, and a print. It’s never exactly any of those things. The indexical element is extremely important to me, but, ultimately, I want them to function as paintings, as abstract paintings, and to be something that doesn't really resolve itself, but also engages the idea of image-making and images.

There’s a sheer glut of images that we live among. The material of our time is images. I work mostly from my personal archive—everything is culled from that or cannibalized. Sometimes I’ll use a photograph over and over in the work, but it always turns out completely differently. It’s about addressing the materiality of images in a time when they’re more and more immaterial, and mining how they can be transformed through this really labor-intensive relationship I have with the process and material.

Additionally, a major influence for me is that my mother is a Taiwanese artist with a traditional Chinese painting and calligraphy practice. She’s practiced for almost half a century now. That’s what I grew up around, and so a lot of the things that feel the most imagistic, I think are, at least in my perception, in relation to landscape or a type of “natural” element, although it’s still very abstract.

"There’s a sheer glut of images that we live among. The material of our time is images. I work mostly from my personal archive—everything is culled from that or cannibalized. Sometimes I’ll use a photograph over and over in the work, but it always turns out completely differently. It’s about addressing the materiality of images in a time when they’re more and more immaterial, and mining how they can be transformed through this really labor-intensive relationship I have with the process and material."

DZ: How do you see these influences manifesting in your work?

AK: Concepts in Chinese painting philosophy like the breath and vitality intrinsic to negative space and accessing landscape through memory are extremely important to the work. There is also always this relationship between micro and macrocosm. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the origins of my materials and the implications of land and personal history, drawing connections between heavy metals formed in stellar events, their extraction from the American landscape, my family history of labor in copper mines, and the silver halide crystals in the light-sensitive paper I use.

In my parents’ recent move I’ve also become the steward of my mom’s photographs which filled my entire van. A lot of these images relate to her painting practice and I’m excited to see where they lead me. The sheer mass and weight of all these thousands of photographs is striking as well.

Water Lilies, 2024; unique photochemical paintings on silver gelatin paper, silver gelatin prints, powder coated aluminum, patinated cast bronze and ceramic relief in aluminum frame (9 panels)

DZ: What’s in your archive, or what’s your process of archiving? What’s your organizing process?

AK: I’m very disorganized. [Laughs] I’m interested in the photographic archive in the sense that we all have them now. I don't think I’m exceptional in that I’m an artist and I have this collection of images. On our phones, we all have millions of photographs. Sure, I have large-format negatives, I have all the nerdy stuff. But I also just have a lot of iPhone photos that I might reuse. It’s amassing these daily records of things that are important and things that are totally unimportant, which become democratized into this collection.

And working with a material that already has this relationship to time, and memory, and recording—introducing this idea of using images that have their own time, and bringing them into this conversational framework with other materials and objects—creates something that I can’t entirely name, but is an interpretation of what things like memory and time might be for those materials.

DZ: With this process, I’m wondering about the relationship to control: What can you control? What do you have to just let happen? How does that influence the final object?

AK: Experience brings knowledge and expectation and potential for control, but the beauty of this material is that it can never be fully controlled. This chemical, liquid process is really volatile and has a mind of its own, in a way. So I set myself up for experimentation that will yield unexpected results. It’s a push and pull. At this point, after doing it for as long as I’ve been doing it, I can expect certain things, or move in a direction, or attempt to achieve certain results, but it always ends up a little bit different.

That’s definitely why I’m invested in the material—because there’s a certain level of autonomy that I can never really break with it. The material itself has some agency in the process beyond my control.

I’m a big, big fan of failure in my personal life and in my artistic life. [Laughs] But, I think all these kinds of unexpected things just lead to more work. [Indicates a stack of exposed photo paper on a table.] This is a very messy pile of previously processed work that either is awaiting another action or that I thought were failures of some kind, but I’ve found more and more that they just come back.

"I’m a big, big fan of failure in my personal life and in my artistic life. [Laughs] But, I think all these kinds of unexpected things just lead to more work."

DZ: What’s a failure for you?

AK: Maybe my point is that none of them are failures, even if they failed at what I had wanted them to be. They really do resuscitate themselves and become other things. Or I cut them. These are paintings that I’ve cut into pieces. It’s not that this painting wasn’t good, but it was like, “Oh, you know what that painting needs? It really would benefit from being with this other piece.”

There's an additional stage in my process that’s been amplified in the last several years which is sitting with the material and reconfiguring the works together in a way that embodies more of a collage-type of mentality.

Lattice, 2025; unique photochemical painting on light-sensitive silver gelatin paper, silver gelatin prints, ink in aluminum frame (5 panels)

DZ: And how did the sculpture start coming about?

AK: I started making those in graduate school. It’s kind of a long story, so bear with me, but my dad grew up in Butte, Montana, which is a copper mining town that used to be really booming and, like a lot of cities of industry in the U.S., fell off the map once things dried up and slowed down there. But when he was growing up, it was still quite booming. And my grandfather worked in the mines and was a welder. So there was all this kind of metal and metallurgy in the family. His brothers ended up studying engineering and started a foundry in Seattle. It was something that was always around growing up, but I didn’t start making work there until about 2016.

DZ: At your uncles’ foundry?

AK: Yeah. And so this is again maybe my relationship to process. Like how I’ve taken this very traditional photographic process and I’m working with it very obliquely, I do the same with the sculptural process. I’ve stuck mostly with these ceramic forms, which are molds to cast metal. They’re all hollow. It’s investment casting, which is a lost-wax process. They start in wax—I sculpt in wax—and then I dip the wax objects into a ceramic slurry with sand over and over, then fire it and melt the wax out. So all the interiors of the sculptures are hollow. I’m left with this mold that would traditionally be used to pour molten metal into and then crack, essentially destroying the ceramic to reveal a cast object.

I got really hooked on the mold-making part. I think the language of the mold is so ripe, and really relates to the photographic in that it’s a very high-fidelity recording inside of this material. It’s so high-fidelity that if you left a light fingerprint on the wax, it would be cast in the metal.

But because of the way I transform the materials and work with the ceramic, the forms get pillowy and they get puffier and puffier. It’s sculpting with a notion that everything in the end will turn out much more massive and kind of more approximated. The form gets approximated through the mold-making process.

Negative Array, 2025; 8 ceramic lost-wax investment molds (hollow), welded steel

DZ: And do most of these start with some sort of found object that you then add on to? Like you’re not constructing from nothing abstractly. Or does it depend?

AK: I think it depends. [Points to various sculptures.] These were all horse vertebrae from Montana. I source things from the foundry too. They mostly make machine parts there, so for example, this was an engine part that maybe a blade broke off of and was discarded, which I then used in the sculpture. That was a tumbleweed.

DZ: Oh really? It looks like coral now.

AK: You can get the sense of the contours of a tumbleweed as it contracts under the material. I’ve really enjoyed the physicality, but also the metaphor of the negative. There’s this hollow negative space that is similar to a photographic negative. And, you know, there are all these relationships between photography and death, which is also present working with these hollowed-out ghost forms.

I’m always looking to work with really intensive processes that are somehow within lineages of traditional making, but then I want to engage with them from an oblique point of view to try to come to something unexpected. These [ceramic molds] are never meant to be objects that exist; they’re always destroyed. To stop a process midway is to look at something that’s not supposed to enter as a material in itself.

Super Collider, 2024; unique photochemical paintings on light-sensitive silver gelatin paper, acrylic, bullet-pierced aluminum relief in aluminum frame (diptych)

"I’m always looking to work with really intensive processes that are somehow within lineages of traditional making, but then I want to engage with them from an oblique point of view to try to come to something unexpected."

DZ: To kind of go in the opposite direction of the sculptures… Some of the wall works have a combine quality—like this one with the metal piece with bullet holes or the other with the silver-plated objects—but one of the interesting things to me about the photo paper is that, like you said, you bring this painterly sense of abstraction to it, but it’s also super flat. It’s flat and layered at once. For me there are all these ocular effects from trying to reconcile the dimensionality of the layered forms with a totally smooth surface. I guess I’m trying to ask about surface.

AK: I hesitate to use the word flattening but I am interested in a kind of flattening. All of these disparate timelines and materials and actions get flattened together into the material on a singular plane. There’s an uncanniness to seeing all those things simultaneously, which I think is really interesting.

The confusion of that is something that I’m adamant about. That confusion is really productive, both for me as a maker, but also for [the viewer] to experience something that you can’t exactly pinpoint what the affect is, or how it’s made, or what the material is.

In earlier stages, I was presenting the material very much as the paper itself. It was really crinkled and you could tell it was paper. There was a question about what the material was, but it was just the first question.

Whereas with these, they’re first experienced, I think, aesthetically—as images, as paintings. The secondary impression introduces the material confusion. This confusion extends the time that you can sit with them. And I’m thinking about that extension of time, again, in relation to this really breakneck pace of image consumption that we’re in. I’m interested in the material and nature of images, but it’s also an intentional ploy to confuse the viewer and cause a productive pause in looking at something. A lot of people think that they’re digital, and I'm like, it’s so far from that. But I think it’s fascinating that there’s such a breadth of interpretation of what it could be. I want to keep that open for as long as possible.

Drew Zeiba

Drew Zeiba writes fiction and criticism, including recently for Frieze, Interview, and The Kenyon Review. He is a contributing editor to PIN–UP. He lives in New York. (Photo by Carolyne Loreé Teston)