Nina Kuo

Nina Kuo (Chinese: 郭麗娜) is an Asian American painter, photographer, sculptor, author, video artist and activist who lives and works in New York City.

She was part of the 1990 Clocktower exhibition at MpMA PS1 in a show against racial prejudice, and her mural Politeness in Poverty of 1988 was installed in the Broadway Lafayette subway station in New York City.

[11] Her photo work was included by Lucy Lippard in The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society following a residency at Museum of Chinese in America.

[12] In 1999 Kuo exhibited her Chi Pao (Chinese Banner Dresses) at the Center for Photography at Woodstock that addressed gender stereotypes prevalent in Chinatown.

[15][16] In 2009, Kuo created a series of video, animation and installation art works called Mythical Montage, which examined "illusion, feminine irony and transformations of Asian influences"[17][18] and her Tang Ladies [19] were described as "statuesque, delicate and quiet on the canvas as they investigate anachronistic details" referencing the Chinese woman's desire to fit in, as well as the often negative connotation given to them by society, specifically in New York City.

[24] She has described her Art Deviation exhibition in 2020 as “work that has more surprise and mystery, that is more thought provoking, pleasing and enticing so that it's not just technique... You are trying to draw them into a conversation, to bring in something unusual, to make the viewer sense there is a tantalizing experience.”[25] In 2022–2023, her hand printed photo works Contrapted Series Chinatown and Contrapted Series Quilt, Brooklyn (both 1983), which overlay photographs of New York neighbourhoods with colourful fragments, demonstrating how cultural memory is made from scattered debris, were shown at the Museum of Modern Art's Just Above Midtown (JAM) Gallery.

In 2020, she created a series of sculptures in relation to the coronavirus, honoring the lives of those lost with her "Tomb Clay Figures," which she described to an interviewer for Forbes: "This global pandemic pinpoints how death is mentally difficult.