Catalina Ouyang

Visual Description: otherwise, spite: 1. whores at the end of the world / 2. from every drop of his blood another demon arose (1829-1840) is a life-size sculpture in the round, located at the center of the gallery floor. A crouching human-like figure perches above another figure and stabs them in the eye with a pair of golden scissors. The crouching figure is a beige color with sharp horns protruding from its breasts and a red udder in the place of its face. It wears a skeletal animal head as a hat. It holds the other figure by the neck and over a brick structure that looks like a fire-pit. The figure that lies down is covered in red and pink fabric made to resemble blood and guts. The laying down figure is amputated from the thighs down. Long strands of synthetic hair are placed at its crotch and splays onto the floor.

Curatorial Description: Catalina Ouyang’s life-size figurative sculpture, otherwise, spite (2020) and two smaller sculptures, doubt I (2020), and it bears the traces (2020), posits the body as a slippery material–one that so often holds traces of intergenerational transference and trauma. The sculptures represent figures that border human and animal, sexual and violent, and past and present. These archetypal images reflect upon the ways in which identity is formed and embodied through gender, race, nationalism, and empire. Ouyang’s work explores the relationships between violence, desire, gender and race, and their inscription onto flesh through ritual, mythology, and history.

Visual Description: doubt I (the wreck and not the story of the wreck / at the floor of the flood / primordial lovers / groaning dreadfully / What have we done so wrong.), is a mixed media sculpture made of ceramic, found fabric, and oyster shells. The top of the sculpture is painted with a glossy green finish and resembles an abstracted fragment of a bust (one might make out the images of a neck, shoulder, and breast). Towards the upper right, a wooden horn-like dagger points outward. On the upper-left hand side, a snake coils around in a spiral shape. Worn beige fabric drapes downward just below the snake figure. Attached to the fabric are large oyster shells. Drag net is attached to the front of the fabric and appears like sharp wire. 

Visual Description: it bears the traces if not the stigmata of its ancestry (Oriental Jane Doe) is an abstract multi-media sculpture. It is painted with light nude colors at the top and stained light red at the bottom. A large fossil-like object juts out of the top of the sculpture, taking on the appearance of a human or animal bone. Material that resembles brown human hair sticks to the object on the top right. Two curving lines drape down from the top of the sculpture recalling the arteries of a human heart. 

About

Catalina Ouyang (b. Chicago, USA; lives and works in Brooklyn) has had work exhibited at Lyles & King, New York; Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus; Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA&D, Portland; Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield; Jeffrey Deitch, New York, NY and Los Angeles; Make Room, Los Angeles; No Place Gallery, Columbus; Real Art Ways, Hartford; Galerie Kandlhofer, Vienna; Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas; Kimball Art Center, Park City; Simon Lee Gallery, London and Hong Kong; Micki Meng, San Francisco; and Murmurs, Los Angeles; among many others. Ouyang is the recipient of numerous awards and grants including Fountainhead Artists Residency, 2024 and Smack Mellon Artist in Residence, 2020-21. Their work has been written about in the New York Times, Artforum, frieze., FlashArt, The Cut, Flaunt Magazine, and Art & Object, among others. Their work is held in the public collections of Cantor Arts Center, Stanford; Kadist Foundation, Paris and San Francisco; Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus; Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami; and Faurschou Foundation, New York; among others.