Koak is a San Francisco-based artist whose emotionally charged portraits subtly disrupt commonly held beliefs about identity and human nature.
Read MoreIn her distinctively sinuous, graphic style, Koak works across mediums to render images of figures imbued with a sense of complex interiority, resisting widely held assumptions about the coherence of the self in favour of a more porous understanding of subjectivity.
Known for her comic-influenced style, Koak recalls drawing from comics as a child, and was especially enamoured with the female characters from X-Men.
As an adult, Koak studied at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, completing a BFA in Individualized Studies in 2011 and an MFA in Comics in 2016.
Using a graphic style of bold lines and curvilinear forms, Koak creates portraits of figures unselfconsciously engaged in moments of emotion, tension, and contemplation. Rendered with close attention to their emotional experience and often represented nude, Koak's figures are imbued with a sense of interiority, foregrounding a vast range of complicated emotional states and behaviours. Koak draws from traditions of comic book illustration, as well as from Asian brush painting and European and Japanese animation.
Rendered in her distinctive curved lines, Koak's figures are carefully depicted with a formal sensitivity that complements their emotional complexity. Shown within interior settings, the figures in Koak's portraits are represented in various states of emotional and physical absorption, either alone or in embrace.
In Trimmed (2020), Koak's sweeping lines delineate a nude woman idly fingering a strand of her hair in a dusk-lit room; in Having Feelings (2020), soft, rounded shapes make up the contorted body of woman arched on the floor, a puddle—signifying tears, or some other bodily fluid—forming from the back of her head.
The vast range of emotional states inhabited by her subjects are also often reflected by the diversity of the materials with which they are constructed, which range from oil and acrylic paint to the more delicate mediums of chalk, graphite, charcoal, and pastel.
Refusing the reductive categorisation of emotions, especially as it pertains to the historical delegitimisation of women's experiences, Koak's works focus on embodying the vulnerability that makes self-possession, as well as human connection, possible. The open-ended narratives posed by the complex emotional states of her subjects not only speak to the universal resonance that is so often found in the representation of specific experience, but also enables viewers to connect with the works through their own associations.
Koak's 2020 solo exhibition Return to Feeling at Altman Siegel, San Francisco, centred around the notion of touch, with works whose lush renderings invite a sensorial reading, including a number of small-scale works made with graphite, charcoal, and ink on rag paper. Their intimate scale and warm, hazy compositions give form to various moments of connection: a woman and a cat sitting nose-to-nose in To Think That Touch Is Feeling, two figures caught in an entangled embrace in The Hurricane, and a gleeful figure whose limbs fold in on herself in Your Little Worm (all 2020).
In addition to paintings, drawings, and prints, Koak also regularly includes sculptural works in her exhibitions. Return to Feeling featured the anthropomorphic Bench (2020), the legs of which were formed by two pairs of bronze hands reaching towards each other on either side of the seat.
In The Driver, her 2022 exhibition at Perrotin, Hong Kong and her first solo presentation in Asia, Koak included Strange Loop (2022). The large-scale bronze sculpture features the closely entwined bodies of three cats, titled Grumpy Cat, Happy Cat, and Sleepy Cat, alluding to the difficulty of discerning the boundaries between one's own subjective experiences and those of another.
In 2020, Koak was awarded the Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation, San Francisco and, in 2018, the Liquitex Residency from Minnesota Street Project, San Francisco.
Koak has been the subject of both solo and group exhibitions.
Solo exhibitions include: The Driver, Perrotin, Hong Kong (2022); Return to Feeling, Altman Siegel, San Francisco (2020); Holding Breath, Union Pacific, London (2019); and Breaking the Prairie, Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles (2018).
Group exhibitions include: New Time: Art and Feminisms in the 21st Century, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), Berkeley (2021); 100 Drawings From Now, The Drawing Center, New York (2020); and Female Gaze, Museum of Sex, New York (2017).
Koak's website can be found here, and her Instagram here.
Alena Kavka | Ocula | 2022
