Ling-lin Ku: September 2023
Ling-lin Ku’s studio is a playground and an alchemy of the world where she plays in-between the digital data and tangible materials through digital fabrication. She uses mostly local references including food, body parts, and products, yet through proximity, scale, texture, display structures, and material, Ling-lin upends our relationship to the known. The work slips in and out of categorization, creating a new way in which we come to understand objecthood.
Ling-lin has exhibited her work nationally and internationally, and has been selected into residencies including International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP) in Brooklyn, Summer Academy in at Salzburg, Austria, Haystack Open Studio Residency, L'AiR Atelier 11, Paris, France, and 18th Street Art Center at Los Angeles, CA. Ling-lin is the recipient of Seebacher Prize in Fine Arts awarded by American Austrian Foundation and the winner of Umlauf Extended Prize and Houston Artadia Fellow. She was awarded the Honorable Mention of Innovative Award by International Sculpture Center.
She received her MFA from University of Texas at Austin in 2019 and BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2016. In 2022 she joined the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University where she is an assistant professor at the School of Art.
“I identify as a multimedia sculptor working between sculpture, installation, video, and sound. I use a broad range of processes from traditional hands-on approaches to digital scanning, rendering and 3D printing to make artworks that reflect my studio as a playground and place for dreaming through objects.
When I was a kid, my twin sister and I would project our imaginations onto mundane things. In our imaginary worlds, a simple eraser became a block of butter, a tape dispenser morphed into a snail, and a paper-cut wound was an opening into an animate microscopic universe. Preserving this spirit of play in my studio, I’m interested in creating new languages through object making. Drawing inspiration from local subjects such as food, my body, architecture, and language, I interpret and mimic the world around me with materials and forms. My installations have become an interpreted simulacrum of the world around me. Through playing with syntax, scale, texture, display and materiality I upend our relationship to the known. The work slips in and out of categorization and genre, creating new contexts to understand objecthood.
I think through making sculpture in terms of language. Objects are like nouns and verbs. As a bilingual speaker, I think in English but the way I make objects reflects the logic of my native Mandarin pictogram-based language. Objects become characters, symbols and signs. Puns and awkward language structures inspire my sprawling fields of objects, themselves like long sentences and paragraphs that take on the topographical structure of a city grid.”
Upcoming Exhibitions:
2023 New Member Exhibition, June 30 – September 9, 2023, Brew House Association, 411 South 21st St. #210, Pittsburgh, PA 15203
Tough Art, September 13, 2023 – January 20, 2024, Children’s Museum Pittsburgh, 10 Children's Way, Pittsburgh, PA 15212
CUE Art Foundation, November 9 – December 22, 2023, 137 W. 25th Street, Ground Floor, Between 6th and 7th Avenues, New York, NY 10001
Kent State University Downtown Gallery, April 5 – May 11, 2024, 141 East Main Street, Kent, Ohio 44240
