Courtesy of Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis
Yowshien Kuo is one of three winners of the 10th Great Rivers Biennial Arts Award Program.
Yowshien Kuo wasn’t originally planning to submit an application for the Great Rivers Biennial (GRB) Award. So when he received the call notifying him that he was one of the winners, he was stunned. “I was pretty speechless. I was encouraged to apply last minute and threw an application together to the best of my ability. I was just surprised to have made the finalists, and then, of course, winning the award,” he trails off, still seemingly surprised by the series of events.
The Great Rivers Biennial Award is an initiative between the Contemporary Art Museum (CAM) St. Louis and the Gateway Foundation that began in 2004 to recognize artists in the St. Louis area. Each year, three winners are awarded $20,000 to further their artistic endeavors, and their work is displayed during a major exhibition at CAM.
From an early age, Kuo, who was born in St. Louis, always knew he wanted to be an artist. “When I was young, doing something artistic was the only thing that I would receive praise for. It built up the mindset that I was going to be in the visual arts,” he says. “It was obviously something that I really love to do.”
Thanks to the prevalence of MTV and shows like The Simpsons and Beavis and Butthead, Kuo initially thought the only work available to artists was in the television industry. “I always thought of it as an old thing, not something contemporary. I never went to contemporary museums as a child, so I was never exposed to that conversation,” he says. It wasn’t until college that he discovered fine art, but he later received his MFA from Fontbonne University.
Kuo, who is Asian-American, seeks to humanize people of color through his work. “I want to advocate for compassion and empathy, specifically for those who find the constant sense of disassociation from the circumstances of daily life,” he says.
In his painting “Don’t Cry For Me,” an Asian figure sits just outside a stereotypical American home with an apple pie cooling on a window ledge and an American flag displayed on the opposite side of the house. The man’s face is painted like a clown, which Kuo describes as “the audience’s projection onto them. They’re not actually wearing the face paint.”
Courtesy of Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis
Yowshien Kuo's "Don't Cry for Me"
Kuo says that he’s most interested in exploring “the expectation of holding that gender as a male, and how does that consort with patriotism, pride, masculinity, and at the same time, the history of America and the notions of supremacy?”
According to Kuo, Asian men are typically portrayed in ways that are opposite of the rugged, stereotypical manliness of the Marlboro man and other such characters. He explores this contrast in his work. The figure in “Don’t Cry For Me” “looks at us with Asian eyes” while wearing a Western-style hat and boots. “I use the Western motif because it’s the most effective way to communicate to a global audience that these are American people,” says Kuo. “The Western motif is the perfect vehicle to talk about colonialism, whiteness, American whiteness, and it’s nice to reclaim these properties that are held away from communities of color for the most part.”
Kuo anticipates that his exhibition that will run in conjunction of the other two winners, Yvonne Osei and Jon Young, at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis will explore these same themes and topics. The exhibitions will be on view September 9, 2022 to February 12, 2023.
