Antonia Kuo Unleashes an Elemental Slurry

‘Milk of the Earth’, Antonia Kuo’s first solo exhibition at Chapter NY, pairs fresh examples of her chemical paintings – which use light-sensitive paper in exciting and unconventional ways – with several of her enigmatic sculptures. Combined with her use of diamond-patterned expanded steel mesh, a palette of caustic earth tones and acidic greens evokes industrial processes and toxic ingredients. While visible brushstrokes and graphic contours signal direct authorship, Kuo’s materials also feel like active agents. Her compositions possess the entropic complexity of spontaneous reactions: processes where the flow of energy can be predicted but never fully controlled.

Solar Array (all works 2025), one of several pieces in the show marked by a cosmic motif, comprises chemical paintings, X-rays and photograms arranged in an irregular grid formation. Much of this spellbinding work is given over to a chemical painting on silver gelatin paper that teems with asymmetrical shapes: a dense field of high-contrast graphic energy akin to a psychedelic vector file displayed on a broken screen. Surrounding it are ten black rectangular X-ray films bearing blue spheres at their centres, some with curved lines radiating from them. These mesmerizing orbs hover like distant stars indifferent to the turmoil of our species, radiating calm above the chaotic expanse. Along the bottom of the frame is a long horizontal photogram with a repeating black and white motif that resembles a wrought-iron fence. Besides its pleasing pattern, this device serves as a protective barrier of sorts, reminding the viewer not to fall headlong into the void.

Kuo’s experimental use of photographic materials places her work in conversation with such artists as Hadi Falapishi, Lotus Kang, Mariah Robertson and even Lucas Samaras. In Kuo’s work, the direct application of chemicals generates the look of visceral immediacy – a connotation that shifts as you move closer to the work. Pit Mine is horizontal composition featuring an elliptical flurry of brushwork around a central point that unfolds with gorgeous overlapping shades of earthy red, grey-blue and pinkish neutrals. Delivering granular effects that appear to take place at a molecular scale, Kuo’s technique yields brush marks without volume; the work’s surface is perfectly flat, with the lustrous sheen of a photographic print. The use of photographic paper brings with it a vestigial aspect of the medium: photography is a flattened record of an event that happened elsewhere. Akin to the compression of cultural objects into images circulated online, Kuo’s chemical paintings present the picture of a messy process in a pristine substrate. The cost of these wonderfully saturated tones and impossibly detailed marks is their compression into a uniform surface.

Kuo’s sculptures, however, provide plenty of physical texture; even the works that incorporate X-ray fragments do so in a way that emphasizes the thickness of the film. Negative Array consists of eight lumpy cylinders lying in two rows atop a low pedestal of steel mesh. A grey haze spreads out across their dry, porous surfaces like blooms of mould on a soft cheese. These objects look like relics from an antiquated but dangerous industrial process. Kuo’s work leverages the alchemical connotations of her material vocabulary to amplify the scope of its symbolic power. In her hands, these substances don’t feel like art materials but, rather, an elemental slurry of our planet’s potential energy. The pleasure of experiencing Kuo’s material transformations comes with a reminder that energy is neither created nor destroyed. Somewhere else there is a void, a well, a mine, a body, from which these mysterious, luminous fluids have been extracted.

Antonia Kuo’s ‘Milk of the Earth’ is on view at Chapter NY, New York until 14 June

^{Main image: Antonia Kuo, Radiated Field (detail), 2025, unique chemical painting on light-sensitive silver gelatin paper in aluminium frame, 1 × 1.25 m. Courtesy: the artist and Chapter NY, New York; photograph: Charles Benton}