Afterimage
Cato Ouyang
Painting is the wrong art for people who love justice.
- Anne Boyer
Palinopsia: “seeing,” “again”
persistence of impressions
doomscrolling; emergent forms
seeking shelter in legibility
overworking a surface
coaxing out an image
obliterating it
coaxing out relationality
being obliterated
Afterimage: the painting that limps back to you.
When I walked the Camino, God beat my bones every morning.
I arrived at the tomb of St. James and that night, in my sleep, the hands of Satan descended upon me from a boy with the face of an angel.
I thought I was dead.
You tried everything?
I waited.
You spoke aloud?
I said, God rest me.
You’d let me be lonely?
I thought I was dead.*
-Cato Ouyang, December 2024
* Claudia Rankine, Don't Let Me Be Lonely, 2004
Cato Ouyang engages in object-making, interdisciplinary environments, and time-based projects. Their practice embraces an array of materials including hand-carved wood and stone, paint, appropriated literature and film, family secrets, animal parts, antiques, and a full-scale replica of a trench toilet, presented with varying degrees of legibility. Against affirmational conventions of representation and repair, the works instigate relation through violation.
Ouyang has held solo exhibitions at Night Gallery, Los Angeles; No Place Gallery, Columbus, OH; Lyles & King, New York; The Knockdown Center, Queens; and Make Room, Los Angeles. Their work has been included in group shows at the Cantor Arts Center, Stanford, CA; Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA&D, Portland, Maine; Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; EFA Project Space, New York; Capsule, Venice; James Fuentes Gallery, New York; Jeffrey Deitch, New York and Los Angeles.
Ouyang’s work has been featured in publications including the New York Times, Artforum, Flash Art, Momus, Sculpture Magazine, Document Journal, Art Review, and Frieze. Their work is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; High Museum, Atlanta, GA; Pérez Art Museum Miami; Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX; Columbus Museum of Art; Kadist Foundation, San Francisco; Faurschou Foundation, Copenhagen; Pond Society, Shanghai; and X Museum, Beijing. Ouyang received an MFA from Yale University and is based in New York. They are represented by Lyles & King in New York and Night Gallery in Los Angeles.