高微婷 Flora Kao

ARTIST STATEMENT AND BIO

Working in installation and painting, artist Flora Kao explores the poetics of human relationship with environment. Examining architecture and technology, Kao transforms everyday structures into systems of beauty. Her work investigates our impulse to order and preserve in the face of the unknown and uncontrollable.

Hovering between restraint and collapse, Kao’s installations seek to anchor moments of intense emotion through repeated action. Mapping presence and absence, her art investigates the psychological potential of constructed space. Life-size rubbings of ruined houses capture the visual residue of failure. Installations of moss and airborne plants highlight the transient beauty of nature. In crotcheting a mile of vinyl tubing, Kao translates witnessed trauma into a stark and haunting memorial.

Kao’s paintings investigate the grid that permeates contemporary life. Obsessively overlaying text and line, she creates imagined topographies that translate information into landscape and textile. Her process oscillates between accident and control, the handmade and the mechanical. Kao’s art plays with perception and visual slippage, where data becomes tapestry and street grids dissipate into atmospherics.

Flora Kao holds a MFA from UC Irvine in Studio Art, a BFA in Painting from Otis College of Art and Design, and a BA in Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College. In Los Angeles, Kao has exhibited solo at Grand Central Art Center, Pasadena Museum of California Art, Commonwealth and Council, Gallery 825, Art-merge LAB, HAUS Gallery, the LA Art Show, and the UC Irvine University Art Gallery. Kao’s work has also been featured at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Beijing, Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco, Emily Harvey Foundation in New York, Infernoesque in Berlin, and at various Southern California venues including Torrance Art Museum, Irvine Fine Arts Center, City of Brea Gallery, National Center for the Preservation of Democracy, Culver Center for the Arts, LAXART, See Line Gallery, Edward Cella Art & Architecture, Beacon Arts Building, Phantom Galleries, California State University Los Angeles, Cypress College, West Los Angeles College, California State University Long Beach, and La Sierra University.