RYAN KUO lives and works in New York City. His works are process-based and diagrammatic and often invoke a person or people arguing. This is not to state an argument about a thing, but to be caught in a state of argument. He utilizes video games, productivity software, web design, motion graphics, and sampling to produce circuitous and unresolved movements that track the passage of objects through white escape routes.
His recent projects aim to crystallize his position as a hateful little thing whose body fills up white space out of both resentment and necessity. These include an AI conversational agent that embodies the blind “faith” that underpins both white supremacy and miserable white liberalism and casts doubt on nonbelievers, and an artist’s book about aspirational workflows, File: A User’s Manual, modeled after software guides for power users.
His 2018 solo commission at bitforms gallery, The Pointer, addressed whiteness as “an unremitting affective failure that erases bodies, including its own, in its search for a neutral point of origin,” and doubled as an admission of his own familiarity with the elaborate contortions needed to assimilate into whiteness.
His work has appeared at Queens Museum (NYC), bitforms gallery (NYC), TRANSFER (LA), Stroom Den Haag (The Hague), Goethe-Institut China (Beijing), left gallery (Berlin), Copperfield Gallery (London), Goldsmiths (London), Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts (Cambridge, MA), and MIT Media Lab (Cambridge, MA), and has been published in Artforum, Art in America, BOMB, and Rhizome. He was recently in residence at Pioneer Works (NYC) and the Queens Museum Studio Program (NYC).