Broadway is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new chart paintings and loose, brushy abstractions by Andrew Kuo. Born in New York and raised by a dissident Taiwanese writer father and art historian mother, Kuo has lived an uncommon existence that melds the immigrant narrative, an intellectual milieu, and an All-American passion for pop culture and its discontents.
Kuo’s chart paintings combine an appetite for data with a refined graphic sense and sneakily complex chromatic approach. They harness statistics in the cause of emotional exploration with a sports fan’s zealous response to stats, and present them as programmatic diagrams that make sly reference to the Modernist canon. In this sense, these works are not abstractions, but instead are crammed with complex information that is detailed in a key that sits at the bottom of the painting. This text showcases Kuo’s knack for concise, Tweet-length expression that distills moments both quotidian as waiting for a friend—or as heavy as coping with Coronavirus quarantine.
In proximity to the charts, a reading of the accompanying gestural works is complicated by the implicit welter of content –despite the free-flowing explosion of color. A viewer gets the feeling that these carry coded messages for our pleasure-centers to decipher instead.
As one might expect of our atomized media moment, Kuo is also a published writer and info-graphicist as well as a celebrated podcaster and social media presence. These seemingly disparate modes of output are, in fact, tentacles of an integrated network that makes up his practice. Taken together, they begin to formulate a picture of our culture seen through the lenses of athletics, race, politics music, art, design and the Internet.
