The Unibrow Interview: A Conversation About Time with Andrew Kuo

On a quiet morning sitting inside a gallery that is housing his first ever museum survery, Andrew Kuo and I started to talk about basketball. The context is our coverage of SCAD MOA’s fall exhibitions, where Kuo just opened Attachments, but we were trying to be polite to other conversations around us and basketball is a love of both of ours. And zines, actually. And abstract painting, too. I've been a fan of Kuo's work for as long as I can remember. With his famed color grids, he has made abstraction feel familiar and warm, and let viewers follow his path through it. I had never thought of Kuo as a text artist, but sitting there with him, there were words all around us.

Kuo's new series of notepad paintings further explores his relationship to abstraction as it pertains to mood and time: poetic canvases that feel historic at a moment when attention is fleeting and the pace is relentless. Sports matter to Kuo, and so does his history in zine-making. His early-'90s zine Trash Heap was ahead of its time, a vehicle for discovery and a way to make friends in his formative years. The connection between Kuo's paintings now and those DIY zines is real. There's a through-line here, and it's one I wanted to know more about.

Evan Pricco: Thanks for doing this. Before we get into the work, can we talk about something totally not art-related? How are you feeling about the Knicks? Are you still basking in the glow of what happened? I’m a Knicks fan too. I’m a Warriors and a Knicks fan, which is random. It’s been a good couple of years.

Andrew Kuo: A good decade. And it’s so embarrassing, because it’s a game for children. It’s marketed to children. There are T-shirt cannons. But when the Knicks looked like they were about to do it, I told myself, “This is a time for reflection. Look back. Think of your friends, think of New York. Stay sane, because it’s going to happen.” I did all that reflecting, all that kicking rocks, and when it finally happened, I just felt good. End scene, roll credits. It was wonderful. I was joking with my friends: “This is a time when men can hug each other and tell each other we love them.”

EP: 100 percent.

AK: And that’s what I did for two weeks. I hugged my friends. It was so awesome, and it’s just a game. I’d heard people describe that feeling throughout sports history, and I always thought, I’m never going to feel that. It’s like telling someone what having a child feels like; until they have one, they can’t really know. It feels comfy.

EP: And this relates to art, so here’s the segue: it gives you a sense of time. Time spent, the times things didn’t work out, the frustrations. You reflect in a very interesting, weird way.

AK: It’s crazy. A few Knicks fans in our friend circle passed away recently, and we were just like, “This is crazy.” The reflection is complex because, to your point, it marks time, and it’s melancholy. I kept saying that. I had a running joke that it was Schrödinger’s cat: I don’t want to find out if it’s alive or dead. I just want to not open the box. Because I didn’t know what the world would look like if we won. I’m so used to not winning.

EP: That’s what it was like being a Warriors fan. Forty years of it. When they finally won, my dad said, “I can’t believe you get to see this.” He’d seen it in the ’70s, but for us—

AK: You had to go through Šarūnas Marčiulionis.

EP: Oh, yeah. Chris Webber’s weird years. The weird Gilbert Arenas era. Baron Davis and “We Believe,” which was so exciting. Monta Ellis. We could make a movie.

Okay, so here’s how it relates. I came in here yesterday, and I’m a huge fan of your work. This series in particular I think is absolutely fucking fantastic. I’d read something about it, and it dawned on me: this work is about time. I don’t think I fully realized that until I walked in. I immediately had that feeling.

AK: It is. The charts are all dated specifically to the day, so in my mind they all work as one big mind chart, or a timeline, and you can place them. They don’t overlap. The idea of fast and slow is important to me. It’s become a bit of a stock-market buzzphrase, Thinking, Fast and Slow, the Daniel Kahneman book, but it matters in terms of framing painting, or simplifying the history of painting. Think about what the Abstract Expressionists did with speed, with quick paintings. Jackson Pollock, the GOAT: what he does with time. Paint drying is important. Painting is about paint, and I always have to remind myself it’s about time and material. It’s about paint drying. I think it’s really meaningful that these are acrylic. They’re affordable, they dry fast, and the slowness is the hurdle, because the thinking and the execution are sometimes excruciating.

EP: Was one of your goals to make abstraction warm? To give people access to how abstraction takes shape, which might then help them with any kind of abstract thought in other parts of their lives?

AK: Very much so. The great abstract painters in art history are puzzles, and my attempt to explain them, literally, in the footnotes at the bottom, was a reaction to that. When you see a beautiful Brice Marden painting, and there are some up right now, there’s so much mystery and magic. I asked myself, what if I stripped that magic away and mapped it out? But then within that information at the bottom, I created another layer of ambiguity: poetry, words that don’t connect.

This work is a deeper investigation of that. If you look at a solid swatch of color in these paintings, it starts to reveal itself in different ways. The brushstrokes are uneven. There’s an underpainting that isn’t totally covered, or the tape didn’t do the right thing. That’s the deeper investigation here.

Daniel S. Palmer of SCAD MOA and I had a working title for the show, Sentimental Painting, because as a curator he was interested in the words and the emotional cloud around all this. These are supposed to be about feeling, about very fast gestures and very slow… not layering, exactly, but they take a while. There’s a lot of erasing and second-guessing.

EP: They also feel like a poetic instructional guide on how to see, which I really like. But they don’t force you to see anything. The viewer gets to decide.

AK: Yes. The great text paintings are very appealing to me, and so is the mystery of letterforms, kerning, design. The way a book opens and you see the title, the information, and then the title again; the half-title page is really meaningful to me. My father was a writer, so these are all kind of winks to him.

I also love the idea of letterhead. I made these during the pandemic. God, this is a long-winded way to describe them. But I thought, if we’re not going to survive this, I’d like to see something colorful. I was thinking about Monet and the Japanese garden in his backyard: he put it there so he could go out and look at it. So I found a bodega that still had bright flowers and thought, I want to paint these flowers like that dude did. I painted them on letterhead I made myself, and I’d send them to people and sell them, trying to connect the dots that way. And then we lived, and they became these things.

EP: And we didn’t learn anything.

AK: Oh my God. Some people tried to. Some people saw it as an opportunity, and I thought that was a shame.

EP: Do you see a connection between your Trash Heap zine days and now?

AK: My God, you bring that up! Yes. It’s amazing, because Mac McCaughan (of Superchunk and Merge Records) was about to come by and hang out today, but he had another thing to do. So, Trash Heap was a zine I did in the early-to-mid ’90s. It was my way to participate in my scene in New York, and it’s named after a song by Superchunk, a band I love.

I was a scrawny Asian kid with a cassette recorder, asking bands if they’d answer questions. I just wanted to get them on record saying whatever. It was the beginning of the kind of writing I do in these charts. Both my parents were writers, so it felt natural, and they were so curious about the format: “What do you mean you’re going to Xerox these? You’re going to staple them and sell them?” DIY was a whole new idea for them.

EP: It was right before the internet, too, so the only way to communicate was to actually trade a physical object with somebody.

AK: It’s crazy, because I’ll text Mac today and forget that back in the day I’d write him a letter, put a stamp on it, and wait for his response: “I’ll be in New York on these dates, let’s meet up.” He was so kind to me. That’s when I met people who changed my life. Ian MacKaye was a kind person, too. I wrote him a letter and he was like, “We’re going to be friends now,” and we were pen pals for a while. He’s famously good at that. He taught me a lot when we met up, just in the way he acted around other people.

All those things I was interested in, interviewing other artists, writing letters, they all end up here. Maybe you and three other people would understand this, but in my mind, these paintings are all issues of that zine.

EP: Wow.

AK: In painting form.

EP: I love that. What did it teach you about communication? That you could be direct and abstract at the same time?

AK: In a way, when you put it like that. Those were the typewriter days, the basic stuff: rubber cement, I’d type and then Xerox it. I realized I wasn’t going to be the best interviewer. These guys weren’t going to give a kid real answers, so I had to make it weird. And the only weirdness I knew was the weirdness I felt. So it was honest. An honest weirdness, I hope. It’s embarrassing now. But one of my best friends is the writer Hua Hsu, who wrote Stay True.

EP: That’s one of the best books I have read in years. I grew up in Oakland and Berkeley, so that book means a lot to me. It’s right around the same time.

AK: That book broke my heart. We’re very close friends, and I think Trash Heap made it out to him in the early ’90s. He was like, “Who’s this other Asian dude doing the same thing?” Now, as adults, we’re in the same circles, and it’s mind-blowing.

That connectivity is important. There’s a way for artists to make art, and then there’s a way to show it, and those are two different things. When you do a magazine… When did Juxtapoz start?

EP: 1994. And it ended at the end of 2024, with our 30th anniversary.

AK: Same time. That’s crazy.

EP: It was actually good. It was a poetic ending.

AK: And it was cool because you championed a scene that wasn’t getting enough attention.

EP: It was getting attention within itself, but it didn’t have a voice reaching people who might not have had access to it.

AK: And little did we know at the time, or maybe you knew all along, that it would come back. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s not quite outsider art. It’s art informed by different sources.

EP: For sure. And it’s art deciphered in an approachable language, which is a kind of access art often isn’t given.

AK: It’s like investing. I remember when Dogecoin started, a friend said, “I’m going to put $400 into this Dogecoin.” And I’m like, “You can’t.” He’s like, “What do you mean? Can’t I just do it?” Well, you have to open an account, they have to make sure you’re not a bot, it’s hard, and when you finally do it, it’s scary. That’s all by design. There’s not only money to be made; there’s a class distinction to establish. That’s how the art vernacular works, too.

And that’s exciting, because we can infiltrate it. That’s what makes it fun. People say, “You’re not Rolling Stone. You’re nly making 50 of these zines. They’re Xeroxes that are falling apart. This is not real journalism.” And it’s like, I know all these things, but you can’t stop me.

I’m so grateful that era was the formative part of our generation. I remember Mac asking, “Are you in a band? Do you make a zine? Do you set up shows? What do you do?” He was so important in my life, and he has my paintings in his house, which blows me away. As the internet lurches on and AI presents itself as a new character, I’m so glad we have the foundation of that early-’90s essence.

EP: The physicality of information.

AK: Yeah. Or: what if I just do something? People say you can’t, and I’m like, I’m going to find a way to do this. In the quietest moments of publishing Juxtapoz, you’re color-correcting, proofreading, the non-sexy stuff. Most of it is non-sexy. But it’s kind of sexy in its non-sexiness. It feels meaningful because it means you’re close. And the fun part is asking, “Would you like to be in my magazine?”

EP: Really, the best part is setting it up, getting the issue together. And there’s this other thing I’m learning even more now that I’m starting a new journal: the best part is when a theme emerges that you didn’t know was happening. In this last issue, everyone mentioned magic. Multiple artists from different parts of the world, all mentioning magic. Okay, there’s a theme. It felt really special.

AK: That’s interesting, because I was talking about this the other day. Who is an artist? “My nana makes the best homemade pasta. She’s an artist.” Cool. “This guy can fix a car like nobody. He’s an artist.” I think they’re more like magicians. What they do is magical because it doesn’t quite make sense to us, but it makes sense to them, and there’s a spirituality there. I think it’s okay to say making a beautiful lasagna isn’t necessarily art; it’s sorcery. Jalen Brunson is a sorcerer.

EP: Absolutely.

AK: But he’s not an artist, and people talk about him as if he were. There are many ways to describe art, but it’s like saying Patti Smith is punk. I know what you mean. David Byrne, sure, punk. But if we’re talking about guitar distortion, screaming, simplicity, primitivism… They were there, and maybe they’re even bigger than that description. Calling them punk is a stretch, and calling everything art is a stretch. To make sense of that in my mind, I think: you’re even better. You’re a magician. You wow me. I’m not trying to explain what you did; I’m letting it wash over me.

EP: And with what you’re doing, you’re not trying to wow people?

AK: I’m trying. But art, in my opinion, what I’m doing… there are so many ways to do it. I’m looking at art history. I’m looking at materials. I like paint. We’re surrounded by so many amazing materials, 3D printing, T-shirts, fabric, but it’s enough for a lifetime to say, “I’m going to try to paint with paint.” That’s never going to end. I’ll never figure it out. What if I make it as flat as possible? People have done that.

I always joke that some people think if birds evolved for another billion years, they’d all end up as vultures, because vultures are the most sustainable, effective form of that creature, that dinosaur. And I’m convinced that if every artist, including me, painted enough paintings, we’d end up at Malevich again. A white square. We’d just end up there. Or Ad Reinhardt. But black has too much information; it has to be white. The step after black is white. Still, did Ad Reinhardt end painting? Perhaps. Because every color is in that black. It’s like, well, paint a better painting than this. You can’t. This is the end.

EP: Here’s a question I ask in every interview: What’s the last show or creative experience that made you immediately want to go back to the studio and work?

AK: Oh, man. I’m trying to give a good answer.

EP: It could be a bad answer, too. It could be as simple as going to see Backrooms.

AK: That was a good movie. I always joke that my one unique talent is that everything makes me mad. I tell my wife, “Show me anything. I’m mad at that.” That’s my superpower. I get scared when I think something’s great, which I do, a lot.

But recently I heard some music in the supermarket that made me mad. I think they’re a great band, but it was “Under the Bridge” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and I was waiting in line thinking, “This infuriates me so much I need to go make something. I need to go to the studio.” And who knows, all I did was tape something. But I find the urge to correct the feeling of anger meaningful.

EP: Wow. Just paint your way right out of it.

AK: Right. If you feel grief or sorrow, paint enough to get out of it, make sense of it, find peace. And I always think about that in terms of fast and slow. There’s a lot of peace in speed. A zine is fast. A band can play fast. Life goes fast. But slowness offers a version of peace that’s more obvious. And as I get older, leaning into cliché, it feels good.

EP: Can you paint when you’re feeling good?

AK: Yeah. It never feels like a job. I’ve heard painters frame it like, “I go to work in my studio.” Never. It feels like a blessing. It’s like cooking: it never feels like punching a clock, because there are so many possible outcomes. I don’t know how this sauce is going to turn out. Every basketball game presents a wrinkle you’ve never seen before. It’s a never-ending discovery process, and life’s too short to make enough paintings, or enough magazines.

EP: Are zines still in your life?

AK: I kind of divorced making zines from my life. They’re so time-consuming and hard.

EP: Because you’d get really into it.

AK: Yes. It would take over, and with two kids I can’t dive in. I’d lose money after a month. But recently I’ve been reconsidering. I do the podcast, Cookies, with Ben Detrick, and I said, “What if we sent our subscribers a zine every three months?” He said, “You do it.” And I kind of want to.

EP: And if you do a zine and elevate it, with really high-level people contributing, it gets back to the old school, when people had to read a newspaper to get their daily intellectualism.

AK: To your point about elevated, one of the best zines I have is by Eric Elms, who did work for Supreme. He made a zine where he zoomed in on the people watching the dunk contest.

EP: All I can think of right now is that famous poster of Jordan flying through the air in 1988, wining the dunk contest from the free throw line. There are so many incredible little things happening in that poster.

AK: And it was all pixelated, on purpose, and he’s a master, so obviously it looked great. I was like, “This is the coolest thing, man.” He only made two runs of it. That’s a tragedy.

I’ve been going through all my old zines, and it’s crazy to see how many people in those pages are still in my life. Brandon Stosuy was a writer at Pitchfork and curates metal shows now; he did a zine back in the day. David Grubbs is still around. I’ve been thinking about it a lot because I have kids now, and I can see how their lives with me are going to go, even though they’re just five. It’s going to take off like a jet at 10, 11, 12. I want to make sure they do something that’s sustainable into their lives. If it’s art, it never ends. If it’s writing, it never ends. If it’s video games, it’ll end.