Cato Ouyang’s Instinctual Mode of Making
Words by Daisy Ryan | Photography by Olivia Parker
New York-based artist Cato Ouyang’s practice is characterised by non-resolution, extending space for the unresolvable. “I don't think I or my work are trying to salvage something. I don't think art can do that,” they share. For critic and literary theorist Leo Bersani (1936–2022), the culture of redemption was deceptive and dangerous: art provides no unity to life and, in fact, destabilises it. Ouyang similarly treads with caution.
“In the fallacy that a painting might directly engender quantifiable change, you're looking for the wrong thing,” Ouyang warns. This sentiment finds place in the American artist’s recent solo exhibition, Afterimage (2024-2025), shown at No Place Gallery in Columbus, Ohio. At the top of the press release was a quote from poet Anne Boyer: “Painting is the wrong art for people who love justice”. It’s a sharp, if not ironic, introduction to a show predominantly featuring paintings.
While Ouyang's practice has predominantly encompassed sculpture, installation, film and performance, their evolving relationship with painting reflects a broader shift in how they navigate both their personal and professional life as an artist in an increasingly precarious world.
Within economies of desire and exchange, Ouyang traces the parallel between the commodification of the body and the commercialisation of paintings. While the inclusion of paintings in their 2024 exhibition Trick was a “more deliberate and conceptual gesture”, driven by a desire to critically engage with art objects’ relationship to value and class, the paintings in Afterimage deepen Ouyang’s heartfelt engagement with the medium.
Notwithstanding the commodification inherent in the art world, Ouyang welcomes the tension as generative: “I resent the fact that things that are not paintings resist the outcome of making a living. Resentment and antagonism are undercurrents in my work; I want to spend time in these uncomfortable spaces, with things that I fear or hate.” The interplay between pleasure and suffering, and reverence and restraint, has long coursed through Ouyang’s work, but recent gestures suggest a turning inward, toward something more alchemical.
This body of work also comes under a new name. Cato Ouyang first gained recognition under the name Catalina, which they claim they have always had an “uneasy relationship” with: “It’s coquettish musicality felt ill-suited to my bluntness,” they share. After they embarked on the Camino de Santiago, the historic 500-mile Catholic pilgrimage across Spain, a ritualistic act of self-reclamation unfolded: they cut their waist-length hair and relinquished their birth name, both cast off as “dead symbolic things”. The gesture became both severance and salve – an embodied shedding of inherited narrative in favour of something unburdened, which Ouyang refers to as: “The violations that my femininity, sex and youth have invited throughout my life.”
Ouyang’s practice has been charged by the weight of these violations. Devotion (2016-2021), a central work in their 2021 exhibition White Male Ally held at Lyles and King in New York, featured seven drawings based on selfies sent by Ouyang’s former partner after he raped them, as told by the artist. Positioned before them, a doll sits at a school desk, repeatedly stabbing an image of an ultrasound. Devotion discloses trauma in the quiet acts of retribution. As Ouyang admits, although “somewhat different” from their more recent work, Devotion is “probably my favourite work”, maintaining that “the phenomenon of imitating the aggressor really resonates with me”. It continues to seed their interest in the failures of language and institutional structures.
The more familiar and seductive of Ouyang’s studio practice is predicated on collage and syncretism, which the artist describes as: “A chaotic endeavour of combining disparate references and found materials.” Sourcing from tales of Roman and Chinese mythology, Catholic iconography, appropriated literature and cultural artifacts, Ouyang attends to a critical reimagining of historical, political and sacred formations. Their topographies function like misremembered dreams: “I like this ornate, thick, layered, aesthetic space; it creates spaces for shadows, for things to hide, opportunities for discovery.”
Bodies fragmented, taped, stuffed and sutured into uneasy arrangements burgeon in fictitious environments. Mannequins lie atop wooden fixtures, outstretched like driftwood or a castaway. Gauze, hair, toothpaste and blood – materials that speak of residue and rupture – are common finishes. The landscapes are half-familiar, half-feral, where the violence of memory both rises and dissipates through encounters with sensual forms.
Ouyang recalls that as a young artist, their practice was characterised by a compulsion for structure – researched, conceptually airtight and built around clear arguments. Over time, this urgency has given way to a more instinctual mode of making. Where earlier works parsed the architecture of power through flesh and language, the pieces in Afterimage hummed with a quieter, more mystic quality. The exhibition emerged after the Camino de Santiago and during a period of “emotional gestation” for the artist, marked by brain fog, medicated dreams and bed-rotting. Fragments of overstimulating media became soft afterimages etched into memory. Pulled from the endless scroll of doomsday headlines and nihilist memes, Ouyang translates this phenomenon through painting.
In the wake of lingering afterimages, Ouyang reflects, “The more years I've spent with the persistent questions of ‘What should art do?’ and ‘What really is its purpose?’, I really believe that it has this spiritual internal element that transcends any kind of aesthetic, social or even political function. These images beckon toward a more mystical transformation.”
In stewarding beauty and exhibiting suffering, Ouyang resists seeking justice or peace between conflicting realms, recognising the impossibility of such resolution: “It is about embracing and extending the space of the unresolvable. Like creating a womb, it's a fluctuating space; it can be a spiky space. To look in the face of horror or evil and look with a deep sense of love.”