Ling-lin Ku: Insight Outsight

Mentored by Agnieszka Kurant Presented by CUE Art Foundation

All artwork © Ling-lin Ku Photos by Leo Ng CUE Art Foundation 137 West 25th Street New York, NY 10001 Graphic Design by Olivia Norris

November 9 – December 22, 2023 CUE Art Foundation EXHIBITION MENTOR Agnieszka Kurant CATALOGUE ESSAYIST Constanza Salazar WRITING MENTOR Carson Chan

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION Insight Outsight is a solo exhibition by Pittsburgh-based artist Ling-lin Ku, with mentorship from Agnieszka Kurant.

The exhibition playfully interrogates relationships between natural, built, and digital environments through the lens of insects. Ku’s sculpture and installation works utilize digital fabrication to generate a world that leaps between macro and micro scales, questioning familiar dichotomies between animal and human, ecology and technology, and the metaphorical and the physical.

Insight Outsight presents a playground of discovery, exploring the tensions and collaborations inherent in our turbulent digital age. The algorithmic landscapes of contemporary social worlds are in constant renegotiation, and can feel, at times, both gratifying and unsettling. Ku traces the patterns and assumptions of human digital infrastructure and behavior to notions of calculation, optimization, and rationality in insect life, creating glimpses of familiarity in a context that often feels vast, unknowable, and inaccessible.

The insects that live within the exhibition are diverse and multifaceted. They slip in and out of recognition, moving between physical and digital space. They reveal themselves primarily in vignettes and fleeting encounters, resisting easy categorization and identification. Creatures sit within a scale reminiscent of vertebrae; webbed hands and feet protrude from a polygonal form; legs are affixed to circuit infrastructure; the numbers “404” are engraved onto a glitched ovoid abdomen.

Ku positions the subjects of her works in ways that subtly subvert the notion of camouflage as a defense mechanism, and instead reorient it as an active, creative, and colorful process. In mapping parallels between the technological and social worlds of humans and insects, she seeks to embrace new ways of thinking about the sensations, perceptions, movements, stratagems, and patterns of organization that structure our individual and collective experiences and actions. “What do insects know that we do not? What can they tell us about the world?” asks catalogue essayist Constanza Salazar.

“In this work, viewers are reminded that they belong to a larger macrocosm of diverse species life, and the anthropocentrism of humans is momentarily overturned to highlight this ecological reality.”

Insight Outsight poses key questions about the duality of intrinsic and contextual identities, prompting us to thoughtfully interrogate the role of metamorphosis in our ever-changing environments. In what ways do we render ourselves visible and invisible in these new landscapes? What kinds of shifts authentically promote our personal and societal progress? What transformations can occur when we seek to better understand our multiplicities? Drawing from references in visual art, anthropology, entomology, literature, and media theory, the exhibition invites us to rethink the ways in which we organize ourselves and to reimagine what is human in a world that can sometimes feel insufficiently so.

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ARTIST STATEMENT Ling-lin Ku My studio is a playground for material alchemy and daydreaming. I play between digital data and tangible materials. When I was a kid, my twin sister and I would project our imaginations onto mundane things. In our imaginary world, a simple eraser became a block of butter, a tape dispenser morphed into a snail, and a paper cut wound was an opening to a microscopic, animate world. We invented secret languages, imaginative toys, alter egos, and ongoing narratives in an exclusive world that still exists in our adult lives.

My installations have become an interpreted simulacrum of the world around me. By playing with syntax, scale, texture, display, and materiality, I upend our relationship to the known; the work slips in and out of categorization, creating new contexts to understand objecthood. Utilizing digital applications as a drawing medium, my imagination inhabits the edgelessness of the digital realm. Working within 3D modeling software is like jumping into my own threedimensional rabbit hole.

Through this process, I create objects that go beyond our conventional understanding of the physical world, where seemingly familiar things can have alternate and imaginitive identities. Serving almost as distorted offsprings of my sculptural works, the digital sketches I create form a virtual index that I also use as the building blocks for short animations that reflect upon the familiar and the uncanny.

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LING-LIN KU is a visual artist currently based

in Pittsburgh, PA. Her studio is a playground and an alchemy of the world. Ku plays with the space between digital data and tangible materials through digital fabrication. Her work draws from local references, including food, body parts, and products, but she recontextualizes them through proximity, scale, texture, display structures, and material, upending our relationship to the known. The work slips in and out of categorization, creating a new way in which we come to understand objecthood.

Ku’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, in cities that include Barcelona, Paris, Salzburg, New York, Richmond, Austin, Houston, and Los Angeles. She has been in residence at the International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP) in Brooklyn; the Summer Academy of Fine Arts in Salzburg; Haystack Open Studio Residency in Maine; L'AiR Atelier 11 in Paris; and 18th Street Art Center in Los Angeles. She is also a recipient of the Seebacher Prize in Fine Arts awarded by American Austrian Foundation as well as the Umlauf Extended Prize for alumni of UT Austin. In 2019, she was named a Houston Artadia Fellow. In 2021, she received an honorable mention for the International Sculpture Center’s Innovator Award.

Ku received an MFA from University of Texas at Austin and a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University.

In 2022, she joined the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University where she is an assistant professor at the school of art.

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MENTOR STATEMENT Agnieszka Kurant Ling-lin Ku’s practice strongly resonates with many questions I have been exploring in my own work over the years. After spending some time with her ideas and installation, I see how her art addresses the ways in which everything in the world undergoes perpetual metamorphosis. The accelerated evolution of technologies mimics the evolution of biological species in deep time.

Millions of years before human civilization, various nonhuman species evolved complex technologies, such as the building of architectural and engineering structures (termites), the internet of trees or the “wood wide web” (mycorrhizal networks based on the symbiosis of fungi and roots), and “genetic scissors” or the ability to cut DNA, which enabled CRISPR–Cas9 technology (bacteria).

Nonhuman animals and insects broaden our perspective on the history of media and technology, and an awareness of their behavior helps us to realize how much the optimization algorithms of artificial intelligence resemble evolutionary adaptations of living organisms.

Drawing upon the entanglement of human and nonhuman technologies, Ku’s work juxtaposes and fuses ideas of machinic and insect cognition and vision, computational optimization, and animal evolution and behavior. Her sculptures oscillate between micro and macro scales, probing the ever-blurring boundary between organic and synthetic, digital and biological, machine and organism. The work questions visibility and perception in the post-human world, analyzing the physical and material properties of human and nonhuman technologies.

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I was particularly struck by the artist’s use of abstract forms, such as the pink square with four protruding demi-spheres presented on the wall. Like a magnified piece of Lego or a microscopic photograph of microbes, the work highlights the machinic aspects of biological forms and the biomimetic design strategies employed by industrial manufacturing. Contemporary industries such as robotics carefully study and try to mimic the organic forms developed by species such as jellyfish, cephalopods, and insects in order to grab and manipulate objects. Meanwhile, biotech startups often experiment to reproduce melanocytes and chromatophores — a wide range of pigment-rich cells evolved by mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, and cephalopods (squids, cuttlefish, and octopuses), for coloration. The primary function of these cells is camouflage, used as a defense mechanism to match the color, brightness, and texture of the background.

These camouflage patterns present in the natural world were adopted long ago by the fashion industry.

Ku’s work echoes the industrial application of biological patterns detached from their original functions, but here they are covering cubic forms, resembling architecture. Her installation also incorporates non-functioning surveillance cameras, emulating bug eyes or architectural ornaments. Their mere presence is enough to instill an atmosphere of surveillance.

The artist juxtaposes natural, digital (virtual), and built environments — drains, grills of ventilation shafts, and ladders sit alongside organs developed by insects; a

Detail of Las memorias de las huellas (The memories of thumbprints), 2022

straw is presented next to a centipede, its biological inspiration; a flood scale seems to melt as it is slowly colonized by caterpillars escaping the cataclysm caused by human civilization; a spiderweb and cage are juxtaposed with circuit boards and microchips, representing the connectedness of digital networks and the ubiquity of terminology drawn from insects in the metaphorical language of contemporary technology.

Alongside Ku’s digitally fabricated objects, affixed to one of the surveillance cameras structures, sculptural lanternfly wings are attached to the surface of a sticker, a real fly trap that is perhaps the only non-printed, ready-made object presented in the show. It provokes the idea that Ku’s entire installation could be viewed as a trap — a simulacrum able to capture viewers in a feedback loop, or a solipsistic space of humannonhuman-machinic perception.

The metamorphic aspect of Ku’s work is very striking.

The forms she employs are fragmented, as if undergoing perpetual transformation and insect-like metamorphosis. The artist’s work emulates both the pixelation and glitching of digital images as well as the mosaic-like vision of insects through their compound eyes. Here, these two visions come together as a fusion of insectoid and machinic media present in our lives.

Ku’s work embodies the urgent need to develop a kaleidoscope of more-than-human perspectives and cosmologies in order to grasp the complex ontology of things and beings that surround us in the world. Her project maps the transformations of the human — the posthuman ecologies and patterns of organization that structure our individual and collective experiences and ways of being.

AGNIESZKA KURANT (Łódź,Poland,1978)

is a conceptual artist whose work investigates collective and nonhuman intelligences, the future of labour and creativity, and the exploitations within surveillance capitalism. Kurant is the recipient of the 2020 LACMA A+T Award, the 2019 Frontier Art Prize, and the 2022 Google AMI Award. Her past exhibitions include a solo show at Castello di Rivoli (2021-22) and at Hannover Kunstverein (2023); a commission for the façade of the Guggenheim Museum, New York (2015); a permanent commission for the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA; a solo show at the Sculpture Center (2013); and the Polish Pavilion at the 12th Venice Biennale of Architecture (with A. Wasilkowska, 2010).

Kurant's work has been featured in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Pompidou Center, Paris; the Istanbul Biennial; SFMOMA; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Guggenheim Bilbao; CAPC Bordeaux; Kunsthalle Wien; Witte de With, Rotterdam; Moderna Museet, Malmö; GAMeC, Bergamo; Whitechapel Gallery, London; The Kitchen, New York; Triennale di Milano; the de Young Museum, San Francisco; Frieze Projects; Performa Biennial; and ZKM, Karlsruhe. She was an Artist Fellow at the Berggruen Institute (201921), a visiting artist at MIT CAST (2018-2019), and a fellow at the Smithsonian Institute (2018).

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A "Bug" in the System Constanza Salazar The origin of the term “bug” in computer culture is often attributed to U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, after an incident involving a moth inside Harvard University’s Mark II computer. This story exists alongside others, like that of Thomas Edison using the term to first signify a defect in his phonograph, but it nevertheless raises the question of how insects, or bugs, have become commonplace in popular computer slang, a linguistic relationship we often take for granted.

In Insight Outsight, multimedia artist Ling-lin Ku exhibits playful sculptures that reveal the viewer’s linguistic and ecological entanglement with insect life, reminding us that digital media has always had very real material properties and effects, and compelling us to imagine a world beyond ourselves.

I first became aware of the metaphorical and material intersections between nature and technology after reading Jussi Parikka’s Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology, published in 2010. In the text, Parikka uncovers how insect life has been translated to modern media technologies since the 19th century. For instance, humans speak about a hive to signify distributed intelligence, a swarm to describe coordinated organization, and the web to delineate connected systems and networks. In all these metaphors, insect life is used to orient us to the possibilities of communication, coordination, and even architecture, or at least to implement tactics of modern power structures. Parikka, however, recovers the inhumanity of media to say that “there is a whole cosmology of media technologies that spans much more of time than the human historical approach suggests. In this sense, insects and animals provide an interesting case of how to widen the possibilities to think about media and technological culture.”1 In Insight Outsight, Ku builds upon this dialogue,

opening up a new dimension to think through the parallels between insect and human technological life.

Ku’s works emerge as fantastical experiences that one slowly uncovers. With the use of computer technologies, contemporary art today often presents spectacles that thrive on the immediacy and overconsumption of images, eliciting a feeling of immersion, such as in works by Refik Anadol, Cao Fei, and teamLab. By contrast, in Ku’s multi- media sculptures, she emphasizes a subtle form of discovery that provokes feelings of delight and surprise on a micro scale. The title of this exhibition, Insight Outsight, suggests tensions between multiple layers of seeing and being seen, including sight facilitated by technological tools such as a computer screen or camera. Take the 3D printed sculpture with a 404 error code engraved onto the body of an insect, in which the code is at first glance barely visible due to its transparency. Its conceit lies in its multi-layered significance. In computer language, the 404 error code tells a computer user about a missing requested webpage. In Ku’s sculpture, the viewer witnesses the insect transforming into a digital “bug” frozen in time.

Caught in the process of metamorphosis between insect and digital media, the sculpture’s form is rendered as a “glitch.” While glitches are typically faults or errors that prevent the functioning of various types of operations, in Ku’s works, they also represent opportunities for interspecies understanding and relation.

The tactics of camouflage and mimicry utilized by Ku throughout the exhibition aid in the viewer’s visceral engagement of the sculptural works in the show. Despite its military genealogy, camouflage has recently been taken up as an urgent artistic counter-strategy, often through performance. Artists such as Hito Steyerl, Leo 23

Selvaggio, and Adam Harvey, among others, have used camouflage to protect themselves against surveillance technologies, in particular facial recognition.

Ku’s works similarly employ a sense of concealment as a visual strategy against the proliferation of images that mark our contemporary condition. For instance, she installs non-functioning surveillance cameras throughout her work as a strategy to instill a feeling of being watched. This uncanniness through artifice elicits in viewers contrasting reactions of both curiosity and self-regulation. However, rather than returning to the postmodern screen-based landscape where once intrusive surveillance technologies have become commonplace, Ku orients the viewer toward the differences and similarities by which insects and humans view the world, either through their own eyes or assisted with technologies like cameras. Insect vision, which creates a mosaic of images through compound eyes, and technological vision, which pixelates images in the works, come together to signal the way humans have adopted non-human vision into our day-to-day lives.

In another of Ku’s sculptures presented as part of the exhibition, fluorescent green caterpillars crawl inside the crevices of the numbers on a bright yellow flood scale. While scales such as this one are typically used to measure the severity of floods, in Ku’s work, it and the caterpillars take on multiple meanings. Witnessing their slow ascent of the scale, it is difficult not to anthropomorphize them, giving them human qualities of sentience and wondering about their insect logic.

What do insects know that we do not? What can they tell us about the world? As they climb the structure (metaphorically related to humans climbing social ladders), their instinct for survival undeniably has an overtone of ecological urgency, of surviving the rising tides brought by climate change. In this work, viewers are reminded that they belong to a larger macrocosm of diverse species life, and the anthropocentrism of humans is momentarily overturned to highlight this ecological reality.Technology and nature further intertwine in Ku’s artistic practice. Through the digital fabrication of organic forms in 3D animation, surveillance cameras, and 3D 24

printed glitched objects, Ku emphasizes the materiality and objecthood of nature rather than merely relying upon technology in itself. Ku offers us moments of respite from our technological daze to return to the world and its real material properties and effects.

There is a kind of ecological recalibration in the works that provoke viewers to simultaneously reflect upon their finitude and the world they will leave behind. For instance, a plastic straw that doubles as a centipede is not simply a symbolic placeholder for the ecological effects of human waste, but also as a real posthuman entity that, nevertheless, survives in the Anthropocene.

It is said that plastic takes up to 1,000 years to decompose, but what happens in the meantime?

Insects, like all animals that came before human civilization, have gone through eons of adaptation and survival. Humans are usually not privy to waste and its lifespan, and yet waste like many forms of insect life, will outlive us.

In Insight Outsight, viewers first encounter what appears to be a playground of insects engaged in a game of hide-and-seek, slowly emerging and withdrawing from sight. Over time, one develops a newfound understanding of humanity in this macrocosm between nature and technology. In the end, we are left with a sense of transitory belonging and a perspective that will linger for some time.

Endnote: 1. Jussi Parikka, Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xiv.

About the Writing Program This text was written as part of the Art Critic Mentorship Program, a partnership between CUE and the AICAUSA (the US section of the International Association of Art Critics). The program pairs emerging writers with art critic mentors to produce original essays about the work of artists exhibiting at CUE's gallery space. For more information about the program, visit the ACMP page on CUE's website at www.cueartfoundation.org.

No part of this essay may be reproduced without prior written consent from the author.

CONSTANZA SALAZAR is the author

of this essay. Salazar is a Canadian art historian, educator, and writer based in New York City. Her work centers the histories and theories of technology, new media, and art. She has presented papers internationally, and her writing has been published in Momus, Afterimage, and Internet Histories, among others.

Salazar is currently working on a book project based on her Ph.D. dissertation, entitled Embodied Digital Dissent: Co-opting and Transforming Technologies in Art, 1990-Present.

She received a Bachelor in Fine Arts and Philosophy at the University of Waterloo in Canada, a Master in Art History at the University of Guelph in Canada, and a Ph.D. from Cornell University in New York.

CARSON CHAN served as the mentor for

this essay. Chan is the inaugural Director of the Emilio Ambasz Institute for the Joint Study of the Built and Natural Environment at the Museum of Modern Art, and a Curator in the museum’s Department of Architecture and Design. He develops, leads, and implements the Ambasz Institute’s research initiatives through a range of programs, including exhibitions, public lectures, conferences, seminars, and publications.

Before joining MoMA, he worked as an architecture writer, curator, and educator. In 2006, he co-founded PROGRAM, a project space and residency program in Berlin that tested the disciplinary boundaries of architecture through exhibition making. Chan cocurated the 4th Marrakech Biennale in 2012, and the year after he served as Executive Curator of the Biennial of the Americas in Denver.

He holds a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Cornell University and a Master of Design Studies from Harvard Graduate School of Design. His doctoral research at Princeton University tracks the architecture of public aquariums in the postwar United States against the rise of environmentalism as a social and intellectual movement. He is a founding editor of Current: Collective for Architecture History and Environment, an online publishing and research platform that foregrounds the environment in the study of architecture history.

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ABOUT CUE ART FOUNDATION CUE Art Foundation is a nonprofit organization that works with and for emerging and under-recognized artists and art workers to create new opportunities and present varied perspectives in the arts. Through our gallery space and public programs, we foster the development of thought-provoking exhibitions and events, create avenues for mentorship, cultivate relationships amongst peers and the public, and facilitate the exchange of ideas.

Founded in 2003, CUE was established with the purpose of presenting a wide range of artist work from many different contexts. Since its inception, the organization has supported artists who take risks that challenge public perceptions, as well as those whose work has been less visible in commercial and institutional venues.

Exhibiting artists are selected through two methods: nomination by an established artist or selection via our annual open call. In line with CUE’s commitment to providing substantive professional development opportunities each artist is paired with a mentor, an established curator or artist who provides support throughout the process of developing each exhibition.

To learn more about CUE, visit us online or sign up for our newsletter at www.cueartfoundation.org.

SUPPORT Insight Outsight is supported, in part, by the Taiwan National Culture and Arts Foundation.

Programmatic support for CUE Art Foundation is provided by Evercore, Inc; ING Group; The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation; The William Talbott Hillman Foundation; and Corina Larkin & Nigel Dawn.

Programs are also supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council; the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature; and the National Endowment for the Arts.

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STAFF Jinny Khanduja Executive Director Jasmine Buckley Gallery Associate Keegan Sagnelli Communications Associate Ninoska Beltran Gallery & Production Intern Evelyn Sislema Development & Communications Intern BOARD OF DIRECTORS Theodore S. Berger, President Kate Buchanan, Vice President John S. Kiely, Co-Treasurer Kyle Sheahen, Co-Treasurer Lilly Wei, Secretary Amanda Adams-Louis Marcy Cohen Blake Horn Thomas K.Y. Hsu Steffani Jemison Vivian Kuan Aliza Nisenbaum Gregory Amenoff, Emeritus

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