SHIDA KUO
Shida Kuo (b. 1959, Taipei) has lived and worked in New York City since 1989. He has had oneperson exhibitions at venues such as Nancy Margolis Gallery, New York; Gallery 456, New York; 80 Washington East Gallery, New York; Fine Metal Concept, New York; Eslite Gallery, Taiwan; Gallery Mic Art, France; and Sokyo Gallery, Kyoto; Sokyo Atsumi Gallery, Tokyo, Japan. His work has been included in group exhibitions at the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY; New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM; Hammond Museum, North Salem, NY; Queens Museum, New York; National Museum of History, Taipei; Wayne Art Center, Wayne, Pennsylvania; Multnomah Art Center, Portland, OR; Apex Art, New York; and Baltimore Clayworks, Yixing Ceramics Museum, China, among other spaces. Works by Kuo are held in the collections of the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts; Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art; Racine Art Museum, Racine, WI; San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts, San Angelo, TX; Edward R. Broida Collection, Orlando, FL; Yageo Foundation of Art, Taipei; Centro Cultural Paraxo, Alaasio, Italy; Yixing Ceramics Museum and Shiwan Treasure Pottery Museum, People’s Republic of China. Kuo has been an adjunct professor of Art and Art Professions at New York University since 1993.
Over thirty years, Kuo has developed a distinct vocabulary of forms using primarily clay and wood to create abstract sculptures that resemble distilled biomorphic shapes. Taking inspiration from nature, Kuo keeps subtracting from the shapes until they are reduced to essential and fundamental forms that are richly tactile at the same time. He insists on making works with his hands and often chooses time-consuming processes. As a result, the sculptures carry traces of their making and convey the simplicity and truthfulness of their materials.
Kuo is inspired by the shared experience of perception, specifically by the phenomenon of people from different origins and backgrounds reacting to forms and materials in very similar ways. He is interested in our human capacity to respond to emotional and spiritual impacts on a bodily or visceral level before they can even be understood by the mind. It is important to him that his choice of materials—ceramic and wood—have been used by various peoples for thousands of years and as such represent connections between both cultures and generations. His sculptures, unique to his intuitive and material processes, seem strangely familiar at the time. While they appeal to us visually with their puzzlingly unrecognizable curves, our subconscious seems to be searching for forgotten—or perhaps even future—forms in them.