AGE:31
BASED IN: New York

In 2017, Catalina Ouyang made a dire self-portrait in the form of an elongated Capitoline Wolf, lying on its side with two long rows of bulging teats and a human head. Called bitch bench, it served as a seat from which to view two monitors displaying concrete poetry based on a Title IX report: “the section that declares my rapist is innocent,” the sculptor explains. Ouyang asked poets and artists to “appropriate” and reinterpret that text—nearly one hundred have so far—then recut their responses. “I am the Capitoline Wolf,” they continue, “bearing the weight of the history of men.”

Ouyang, who grew up in the suburbs of Illinois and New Jersey and got their MFA from Yale, often forces counterintuitive junctions—of materials, styles, and perspectives. The personal meets the world-historical; polymer clay abuts wood. “There’s a bit of transgression in the making,” they say. “Or an insistence on putting things together wrong.” But what they describe as an “almost fascist need to dominate a material” is juxtaposed with an “ethos of humility or anti-mastery. I’m always trying to work a little bit beyond my existing skill level or physical limit as a small, weak person.”

Their work can be devotional, if ambiguously so. Their “reliquaries,” a series of carved and encrusted wood figures based on a young girl Balthus used as a model, have small, hinged doors in their thighs or chests that house waxy, pinioned forms. They have no heads, like wooden fragments of icons. “The redaction of the identifying visage has been a strategy of protection,” they explain, “but also a marker of shame.” A suite of wall-mounted sculptures of abstracted fetal puppies, “pronoun of love,” curls away from the viewer but toward silvered or black mirrors. The dog is the wolf, they say, but “bred and raped and bastardized into something that literally can’t breathe or find food for itself.”