From Student to Exhibiting UT Downtown Gallery Artist: Alumni Spotlight on Ceramicist Kevin Kao
While UT’s galleries feature work from many outstanding artists every year, it’s particularly exciting to welcome a School of Art alumnus back to town. Ceramicist Kevin Kao, a 2015 MFA graduate, has exhibited his figure-ish, biology-inspired sculptures throughout the U.S., including a recent solo show at Artspace in Raleigh, NC. Kevin’s work will be in Knoxville this winter, displayed alongside the ceramic art of Donté Hayes as part of Ancestral Objects: Holders of Memory, Space, and Time at the UT Downtown Gallery.
We caught up with Kevin, an Associate Professor of Art at Furman University, to chat about his exhibition with Hayes (on view through February 18), coming into the MFA from a non-traditional background, humor in art, and more.
Tell me about your exhibition at the Downtown Gallery, Ancestral Objects: Holders of Memory, Space, & Time.
It’s something Donté and I have been working on for a little bit. Both of us have very similar-looking work, but we have different approaches in terms of what ceramics can be. Both of us are using and drawing from cultural heritages to imagine spaces, objects, and things – working in an ethnographic kind of way to uncover and discover. Donté is using forms from history, but also incorporating a future in healing contexts.
I’m interested in referencing historic forms from ancient China – so, looking at the objects and obsessions of a literati class during an age of discovery and a creative explosion. It’s a way to comment and reference how the body, self, and education can become symbols of wealth, of vitality, in a very different kind of context.
Besides the UT show, what else do you have going on right now?
I have another show, Yellow There!, currently on view at the Fine Arts Center in Greenville, SC that will be building on previous work referencing serving coasters. They’re amorphic and agendered forms which are playing around with the word serve and the notion of serving. I really like the objects in the show can be functional, while also occupying different ideas of serving.
They’re also highly yellow, referencing the yellow body – an objectification. I’m interested in finding the funny things inside of forms and making visual puns and jokes. Most of my work has always been about the collection, multitude —larger masses of things as a metaphor for Asian-Americans in this country where oftentimes we might appear the same, we might sound the same, we might feel the same, but individually we’re very different. I think this reference to the Asian diaspora as a collective whole can touch on our strength as a culture and as a group, while also celebrating the individualities within collective versus individual identity.
How do you feel that your work has developed since you graduated from the MFA here?
It’s become more abstracted. Right after graduating, I was making a good deal of figurative work, addressing identity and Western influences on visual aesthetics. But I would say that lately, it’s become much more intuitive, a little funnier. I think there’s something funny about not being funny.
Can you talk more about humor in your work?
Humor requires an awareness and engagement about a shared something. Maybe it’s the way we express and understand another, but I wonder: can there be something funny about a shape, a form, a color, or a texture? The nuances of what is and isn’t funny are curious to me, and I hope to make that happen visually in my work.
Tell me about your experience teaching as an MFA student at UT.
Teaching Foundations was so formative for me. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to teach before coming to grad school, but I knew that I wanted to enter academia as a way to secure space and facilities: to guarantee a life-long sustainable practice with the material and process.
I grew to love teaching. I think I developed a teaching personality that is outside of my own. Over the ten years since I graduated from UT, my trajectory has been surprising, especially since I have a non-traditional background as an artist —I have a degree in biology, and went to community college after graduating from undergrad. So, I really enjoyed working with non-majors at UT. There’s just something about the idea that I can introduce people to this awesome thing that I love doing, and to inspire them to love it, too.
Do you have any advice for prospective art students interested in studying ceramics?
It’s a great time to try something you’ve never done before, especially with the excellent faculty and support at UT. The faculty are great at encouraging experimentation through practice – it helps to connect with them early. For graduate students considering UT, it helps to understand the reasons why you want to go, and outline what you hope to achieve with clarity. There are lots of programs and pathways, understanding what motivates you will go a long way. The field itself has changed a great deal – becoming much more accepting and interdisciplinary, celebrating the multiple facets that clay can become – it’s ever changing and ever responding. It’s a great time to study clay!
Learn more about Kevin and his work at https://kevinrkao.com.
To learn about the programming surrounding Ancestral Objects: Holders of Memory, Space, and Time, including an Artist Lecture from Donté Hayes on February 4 at the UT Knoxville Campus, visit https://downtown.utk.edu/donte-k-hayes-kevin-kao.