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Ryan Kuo

He // Him // His

Artist and Writer

Brooklyn, New York

Ryan, a Taiwanese-American man stands with his arms folded against a corner of a white-walled apartment. He is wearing a light-pink T-shirt, wire-rimmed glasses, and a black cap that says, "Make techno Black again."

Ryan Kuo makes process-based and diagrammatic works that often invoke a state of argument. He has utilized videogame engines, web and UX design, chatbots, productivity software, and writing to produce circuitous movements that resemble bureaucratic negotiations and unresolved conflicts.

His work is distributed online at left gallery, has appeared at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Queens Museum, Stroom Den Haag (The Hague), Goethe-Institut China (Beijing), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Goldsmiths, Copperfield Gallery (London), Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts (Cambridge), bitforms gallery (New York), TRANSFER (LA), and MIT Media Lab, and has been published in Artforum, Art in America, BOMB, and Rhizome. Kuo has been in residence at Pioneer Works and the Queens Museum Studio Program. He was raised in Elkins, West Virginia and holds a Master of Science in Art, Culture and Technology from MIT. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He is not a programmer.

Donor -The Knight Arts + Tech Fellowship is supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

This artist page was last updated on: 07.31.2024

Media
Multiple gray macOS application boxes are set against a light yellow background. Each box has a title bar at the top, with one-word titles such as “Future,” “Troubles,” “Time,” “Home,” “Temper,” “Respect,” “Mother,” “Guilt,” and “Love.” Most boxes are pale gray in color, and a box that is clearer and more central, titled “Regrets,” holds a white text box with the words “Swearing on dreading the days of something.

Family Maker by Ryan Kuo, 2017–2018. macOS application, dimensions variable. Distributed on left gallery.

In a room with white walls, two gray chairs and a white coffee table are positioned in front of a monitor, which shows an image of the same room from a frontal perspective. At the back of the room sit a black desk and a smaller monitor showing a geometric form captioned, “Point out the one who is causing these problems,” and small white slips of paper hang from a light fixture on the ceiling. At right, white shelves display identical product boxes with images of a light purple spherical object, captioned with the word “OK”, and circular red stickers that read: “Comes with an exclusive cheat sheet.

The Pointer (installation view) by Ryan Kuo, 2018.

A screenshot of multiple white, red, light blue, and black pop-ups with bold black and white text layered on a museum webpage. The pop-ups show short phrases and captions such as “Sunset,” “Ryan Kuo Has Moved On,” “Bad Feelings Are Good,” “What?” “I Am Begging You,” “Then Cut Me Down,” “Love Is Not The Answer,” “This Was A Setup,” “We’re All Racist,” “You Can’t Make Me Leave,” “And This Museum,” and “It Was Nothing.” More pop-ups are cut off by the bottom of the screen.

Hateful Little Thing by Ryan Kuo, 2021. Generated web intervention, dimensions variable. Commissioned by the Whitney Museum for its "Sunrise/Sunset" series.