Catalina Ouyang

What sort of work did you create with the Stone & DeGuire Contemporary Art Award?
One project I worked on involved new sculptures at Art Basel Miami Beach. With these works, made of papier mache, textile, steel, wood, plaster, and found elements, I was really looking at the ongoing negotiation of memory, embodiment, the ineffable, and the subjectivity of narrative in dense, mixed-media compositions. 

The works consider social space and how we move through it: the built environment, discourse that is fabricated to create the thing called history. Affect and memory. Bones are the architecture of the body, hair and skin are the points at which the body interfaces with its environment. Clothing is an addendum. Lately I have been thinking about Aby Warburg’s term bewegtes Beiwerk, or “animated accessories,” such as hair and fabric which create an expression of inner energy, animation, and lifelikeness in antiquity and Renaissance artwork. In tandem with recent developments in my commitment to my life impulse over my death drive, I have been paring back formal and material elements of my work and trying to ascertain something essential. I do not have identifying language for this “something” yet, but I know how it feels: tended, textured, unbearably light, open-ended, alternately shrinking and billowing. 

I made a lot of new work for a solo show in New York City, titled “Trick.” For the interior space of the gallery, I created sculptures and paintings that reflected themes of value, aspiration, and desire. I worked with a steel fabricator named Eric Coolidge to create a 16-foot-tall sculpture in the gallery’s outdoor courtyard. “Brank,” is a scaled-up replica of an object called a scold’s bridle, which was an iron cage used to punish people — primarily women — for speaking out of turn or gossiping. It would prevent someone from opening their mouth. This was used throughout England, parts of Europe, and colonial America. There are analogs that existed in other cultures as well, because everybody loves to silence women. I wanted it to be of a monumental scale so that it could be an activated space, which happened when I hosted a poetry reading inside of the bridle.

With the glass work, I had always been a little resistant to working with ancient or expensive materials — bronze or glass — because it seemed too obviously precious. But after I visited the Ringling Museum of Art and saw this eye-opening exhibition of contemporary glass work, I realized I wanted to contend with the material. 

There were two projects I wanted to produce in glass: a pair of tall glass cylinders, and a slumped form of draped glass. I wanted to make glass appear like fabric: drape, fold, overlap. I worked with Esteban Salazar, who is a whiz in the hot shop, and Matthew Day Perez, who does casting and slumping. Matthew’s process was more similar to my own, quiet, solitary, and human-scaled; meanwhile, Esteban and his team of three men were slinging around 40 pounds of molten glass — it was amazing.

What has your trajectory been like from your days at WashU to today?
I came to WashU with a portfolio of realistic, expressive, charcoal and pencil drawings. I didn’t know anything about conceptual art or research-based practice until I took a seminar on time-based practice with Monika Weiss. That really opened my world up. I started making video and experimental work, which segued into large-scale installations. Three-dimensional practice felt both more challenging and more expansive for me. 

What was your time at WashU like?
At one point I was really struggling with where I wanted to take my practice. I didn’t know how to take advantage of or appreciate the historical resources I had access to. Looking back, there are some things I really figured out about my intentionality as an artist and the ways I wanted to activate my memory and lived experience. 

I minored in writing, and I learned a lot about art-making in writing workshops. I had a writing teacher, Maria Xia, who gave me this question, which is a tool I still use in my practice today: “What is at stake?” What is at stake in this piece of writing, in this project? 

I also have to give a shout-out to Heather Bennett, who assigned some really influential readings and who I’m still in touch with today. 

What might come next?
I took two significant trips during the award period and filmed parts of each. 

I traveled with my mother to visit my grandmother in their hometown in China. I created these tri-generational scenes with us performing domestic tasks together, following some loose scripts. Both my mother and grandmother didn’t want to be mothers, so I come from this line of women who did not have a maternal instinct but reared children anyway. Participating in these domestic scenes was really interesting — cooking, cleaning, being wives and partners (I’m neither). It’s three people who have this contentious experience with femininity and have always been in confrontation with one another, and we’re doing these very peaceful, humble acts of maintenance. We’re performing the tasks of the living drive, which stand in contrast to the death drive that informs so many other aspects of my work. 

I did a couple of audio interviews with my grandmother — my mom translated — asking about her early life, what she dreamed of when she was young, if she has any regrets, what it was like living through World War II, the Japanese Occupation, and the Cultural Revolution. There is always a boundary between curiosity and knowledge. I want to know, “What have you really experienced? What have you survived? What are you really thinking?” And while my questions were met with resistance and evasion, I hoped to get a deeper understanding of my family through the process of trying. 

The other trip was the Camino de Santiago, a 500-mile pilgrimage that starts in St. Jean Pied de Port in France and ends in Santiago, Spain. I had never hiked before this — I bought everything I needed a couple of days before we left. I wanted to spend a month completely out of my element, exercising, socializing with strangers, sweating and looking ugly. It’s a lot of time to spend with yourself, physically pushing your body to the brink, finding your own capacity for boredom or loneliness. It was immensely humbling. 

I’m still unpacking and processing what I captured. At the moment, I’m picturing a two-channel video installation that combines the footage from China and Spain, and perhaps more to come, and reflects on memory, faith, and desire. 

How did the Stone & DeGuire Contemporary Art Award affect your practice?   Before receiving the award, I had gotten to a point in my practice where I was producing a lot, showing a lot, and barely subsisting from deadline to deadline. I needed to make more work, to sell more work, to make more work. It was not where I wanted to be long term. Having the Stone & DeGuire Award enabled me to take most of 2023 off from exhibiting and selling work, and as a result I recalibrated my practice. It was less about making proposals and executing everything to a T, and more about engaging in serious play in the studio. That wouldn’t have been possible without having time and resources to indulge in that exploration. My practice feels confident, joyful, and dynamic in ways I had lost — or perhaps never had — until recently.