| I like to make simple things complicated. I joke and say this is the way I am as a person too. There’s a truth to everything. So, I like to say my work is about that, specifically, about making and looking. By making my work abstract, it reduces the levels at which someone can identify an image and its baggage. For example, if you show someone a banana, they say, “This is a banana. I can eat it.” But if you show them a circle, they say, “What about this circle?” Then, you direct the viewer down a particular road. |
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Andrew Kuo
I like to make simple things complicated. I joke and say this is the way I am as a person too. There’s a truth to everything. So, I like to say my work is about that, specifically, about making and looking. By making my work abstract, it reduces the levels at which someone can identify an image and its baggage. For example, if you show someone a banana, they say, “This is a banana. I can eat it.” But if you show them a circle, they say, “What about this circle?” Then, you direct the viewer down a particular road. Hopefully that road is an interesting one, and by interesting I mean where the thing someone is looking at becomes a thing about looking. This formal concern is meaningful to me, and I’ve been trying to make work about it in the form of layered drawings on paper, canvas and hand-made books.
I should just say: the work is about abstraction.
So, another influence on my work is music and how people relate to and visualize it. Brian Eno, bear with me on this, once talked about the idea of a song “fading in” and “fading out” as if to suggest that you are witnessing a portion of an endless stream of sound. It’s a simple idea, but, by having something bleed off the edge of a piece of paper, you suggest it. Nothing should just “be” when you’re making abstract work. It all has to have a purpose, right? And it’s also this idea that informed me to start cutting away at the paper, as if to acknowledge the third dimension to the viewer. The third dimension is the one that goes through the paper, and it’s empowering to acknowledge it when you make flat work. I have never tried drugs. Sometimes I have to clarify things when I present my work.
Recently, words have also been popping up in my work. I like to take short, simple words and hide them in the abstractions. Words like “Boo” or “Hoo.” The idea is that, when you recognize something when you first look at it, and you keep looking at it, it doesn’t look like “Hoo” anymore, but three lines and two circles. When that finally happens, when you’re making things or looking at them, it makes it all fun again.
