:iidrr Talks with Cathleen Luo
December 2024
Cathleen Luo
Cathleen Luo graduated from Columbia University with a Bachelor’s in Visual Arts and Creative Writing in 2023 and are currently working as a Museum Educator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They have exhibited in group shows including Of What Remains curated by Lex Jacques and FABnyc’s Young Artists of Color Fellowship show in 2024. Luo was awarded the Asian American Arts Alliance's What Can We Do grant to carry out community art programming in Manhattan's Chinatown during Asian American Heritage Month as a way to share their practice and serve the public. They have also received SICK Magazine's Microgrant for Disabled Sculptors in 2023. They have been interviewed for Ratrock Magazine and have been featured in publications including The Columbia Review and SICK Magazine.
Can you tell us about your background and what led you to pursue art as a career?
CL: I went to a Chinese-owned studio growing up which had, what I’m looking back as, a fascinating structure. I started with oil pastel work in elementary school and studied still life sketching through middle school. In high school, I started charcoal and pen drawings where I finally had more creative freedom over my work and I only wanted to draw portraits, mostly of myself and my friends. Objects and landscapes were not very interesting to me, which still stands true today.
As most people did over the pandemic, I had an existential crisis and realized I had no more energy to do things I didn’t deeply resonate with. I didn’t have a concept of what being an artist meant at the time, only that I could keep painting strange neon-colored femme bodies without feeling existential dread. It felt very right in a time where it felt like our bodies were under attack, by a microorganism, by politics, trapped to our homes if we were lucky enough to have somewhere to call that. Spending time alone in my room made me really question what it really meant to be human, all our strangeness and fluidity that is forced into normalcy, into a 9-5 schedule, into concepts of gender and race.
I chose to pursue art because honestly, I cannot focus on making spreadsheets and coordinating meeting times all day without feeling like my humanity is rotting away. In a vague sense of the saying, I think living is to make meaning, to understand yourself deeply, which in turn, will allow us to coexist with the people and world around us. For me, as someone who is essentially always in a state of over-stim, from my poor eyesight and other things, art allows me to process and find peace at my own pace.
What drew you to ceramics, and how does it help you express the themes central to your work?
CL: Looking back, my work as a painter made more sense in three dimensions from the start. I always cared so much about making bodies smooth and reflective, making sure the lighting and shadows were crisp and rounded..
I’ve always been stubborn against change, but my transition from painting to ceramics was very serendipitous. I was working at the Whitney Museum of American Art in their Access and Community team within the Education department. I was reckoning with identifying as disabled for the first time, and making tactile objects to use during tours for Blind and Partially Sighted visitors was not only rewarding in working towards my goal of making the art world and its offerings more accessible to those who have been historically marginalized, but it made me reconnect with clay, albeit cheap air dry clay. I was making miniatures of Woody De Othello’s The will to make things happen. It just so happens that not only did I follow in the footsteps of the material he used, but I had also been making paintings of body and home. Maybe we were all thinking about that at the time, being alienated from ourselves and society while the world became less and less familiar. I just never quite stopped thinking about it.
Install shot from Dinner Party as Revolution, 2024, glazed ceramic, oranges, silk tablecloth, cushions, porcelain bowls, red thread, US dollar bills, flowers, 12 feet x 2 feet x 5 feet
As a Brooklyn-based artist, where’s your favorite spot to absorb art or find inspiration in the city?
CL: I honestly find so much inspiration on my runs in Central Park and up the Hudson River Greenway. I don’t spend as much time in Chelsea galleries or museums as much as I should, because in my work in museums, I’m surrounded by them all day. I want to spend the rest of my life being very grounded in the world. Running is one of the most important activities to my life because it is the only time I am totally aware of my whole body. There is meditation in the repeated movements, and I am so in my body, trying to catch my breath, and there is so much energy running through me instead of rotting at home and work. It sometimes feels like every step is trying to run my body into oblivion. It’s on my runs that I often come up with my ideas for my projects. I think about Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running when writing about running.
Are there any movies, books, or shows that have inspired your work or shaped your creative perspective?
CL: I honestly find so much inspiration on my runs in Central Park and up the Hudson River Greenway. I don’t spend as much time in Chelsea galleries or museums as much as I should, because in my work in museums, I’m surrounded by them all day. I want to spend the rest of my life being very grounded in the world. Running is one of the most important activities to my life because it is the only time I am totally aware of my whole body. There is meditation in the repeated movements, and I am so in my body, trying to catch my breath, and there is so much energy running through me instead of rotting at home and work. It sometimes feels like every step is trying to run my body into oblivion. It’s on my runs that I often come up with my ideas for my projects. I think about Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running when writing about running.
Your work embraces distortion and abstraction. How do you balance intuition and planning in your creative process?
CL: I don’t think I tried to abstract bodies, I generally am just too lazy and uninterested in honing particuarly realistic portraits, and for someone who doesn’t see details of skin, pores, specific anatomically correct musculature clearly, I never felt the need to draw those out. If I have the basics of a human form that I can recognize, arms, a face, a spine, then that’s all I need. Many artists in the past, also chose the same “abstracted” language to portray people, El Greco, Japanese prints, Buddhist and Hindu sculptures. A replica of reality is not important; a gesture towards a person’s full humanity, interior and exterior states is enough.
Death, Brother of Sleep / the violence of broken english, part of Dinner Party as Revolution installation, 2024, glazed ceramic, 30 inch x 14 inch x 18 inch
Ecstasy Devil, part of Dinner Party as Revolution installation, 2024, glazed ceramic, 32 inch x 25 inch x 15 inch
Your work reclaims the term “queer” and interrogates the concept of “alien.” How do these themes connect to your personal experiences and the larger narratives you explore?
CL: I think about the concept of counterwill that comes up in discussions of disorders like ADHD and autism that point to those who feel an intense reactive rejection to things that challenge their identity. It comes from a place of defensiveness because the creation of their identity is so fragile, we don’t want anything to influence, especially that don’t feel right, to disturb the process of identity-making. I feel as if the standards of gender have always felt reductive and insulting, even as a child. Because I spent so much time in my head, when labels were assigned to me and arbitrary expectations put on me, I felt deeply uncomfortable in my body. Growing up, queerness felt like the right term that held space for the way I wanted to conceptualize myself in the world. It feels expansive, not restrictive, and it has little to no expectations. It is the embracing of all expressions of you and your body, and in my work, bodies never conform to what we expect of them. In the same way, the term alien embraces all the things we don’t expect, allows room for the Other to fill in that space. I think alien also has the fun connotation of having lived a whole different experience that everyone else, which creates a fear that tells much more about the fearful than the feared. Hands emerge out of themselves, bodies bend in ways that are “unnatural” and that shows the power of having walked a different path in life to understand different modes of being and different knowledges that arise out of those experiences of Otherness.
Humility Figure, 2023, glazed ceramic, 25 inch x 20 inch x 12 inch
Consumption Devil, After Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son, 2023, glazed ceramic, 25 inch x 21 inch x 15 inch
You’ve mentioned embracing the uncanny in your art. How do you use this aesthetic to create deeper engagement with your audience?
CL: I often say that I am confused all the time. I find it surprising that most people walk around the world confident of every step they take. Normalcy has always felt false to me, and I think leaning into things that are uncomfortable, shocking people out of what they expect helps us all acknowledge how little we know about ourselves, our bodies, and others. I hope that the sense of uncanniness can help people to question what it means to be.
How does your background in creative writing influence your visual storytelling? Are there specific narratives or ideas you’ve carried over into your art?
CL: Not really lol
Can you walk us through how you approach a new project? How do materials, distortion, and abstraction factor into your decision-making?
CL: I have been struggling with material recently. As I mentioned before, I am very stubborn to change and will work one medium to death, trying to fit my projects into a material until it genuinely doesn’t make sense. Currently, I am using clay because it’s fast, I love working with my hands and feeling all parts of my pieces, my hands have created every inch of my figures. But in order to build bigger, it would make more sense to move to plaster. In a perfect world, I’d have the resources to cast my pieces in bronze, or possibly carve out of stone. But I am terrified of power tools and material that can hurt, and clay feels inoffensive, worldly and grounded.
Self Portrait as Fountain, 2023, glazed ceramic, and water pump, 17 inch x 10 inch x 5 inch
Is there a recent project that best represents your current artistic direction or the themes you’re most passionate about?
CL: A new project I’m working on is about domestic spiritualities, placing my figures in conversation with recognizable household items. I just finished the bisque firing for my piece Bath Tub Demon, where a golden figure languishes in a tub, cigarette in one hand, prayer beads in the other. Their head curves into the faucet of the tub. I am thinking about the complicated relationship I have with home. It is supposed to be a place of relaxation but once I am left alone to make decisions of my time and “take care” of myself, I find myself rotting, even though I am supposed to find comfort and peace at home. This piece is supposed to reckon two different types of comfort that can arise from being home, finding peace and harmony by oneself or indulging in guilty pleasures hidden from the outside world. How do we find peace at home?
Backbender, 2023, glazed ceramic, 18 inch x 18 inch x 8 inch
Your Chinatown programming brought art directly to the community. How has this work shaped your perspective as an artist and educator?
CL: To feel so much resonance and energy with people who share your vision of a future, who accept and celebrate the spaces and futures you also dream and work towards is something that is so enriching. Bringing people together to share their personal stories, of immigration, of relationships with mothers, and equipping them with a critical language, informed by the Ethnic Studies Reader, to process the world aroound them, made me feel the power of creating spaces where people feel safe. I also want to think about art making as something that shouldn’t be a luxury, that working for yourself, for the sake of making something that is a reflection of you beyond that expectation of the working world, should be celebrated.
Installation of Ghost Protecting Series, 2023, glazed and sandblasted ceramics, hydrangea petals, and bandages, 36 inch x 36 inch x 36 inch
Ghost Devil Offering Flowers, 2023, glazed and sandblasted ceramic, hydrangea petals, and bandages, 27 inch x 27 inch x 14 inch
How do you see your art contributing to larger conversations about intersectionality, representation, and community-building in contemporary art?
CL: Art should not be about the artist, it should be about the viewer. Everything is about celebrity and fame, but what is the point of art if it doesn’t reach anyone but a collector and a curator.I want to make installations that create spaces of occntempation, that can encourage people to look at themselves differently.
Can you tell us about any upcoming projects or collaborations you’re excited about?
CL: Following the Bath Tub Demon, will be some other pieces thinking about old box TVs I grew up with, and the pitifulness and clownishness of the toilet. These are very fun and vaguely silly projects that I think both capture my humor and the meditation of home and childhood that I am currently sitting with.
Are there new materials, techniques, or ideas you’re eager to explore in the future?
CL: I hope to get into building with plaster, just to see how much bigger and more flexible it would be.
What do you hope people take away from your work - on a personal level and in terms of the broader conversations you address?
CL: Connect yourself to history. Allow yourself to step out of routine and look to see what you really feel, what things you don’t understand and be humble enough to leave room for all the strangeness of the world. It’s both terrifying and quite beautiful. What a joy it is to be both so small and so absolute.
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