Bio

Molmol Kuo is a Taiwanese artist and educator based in Brooklyn, New York. Her background is in documentary film and experimental electronic art. Molmol’s work spans videos, interactive installations, augmented reality, software, electronics, wearables, and sculpture. She serves as artist and director of numerous productions, collaborating with other artists, programmers, and performers in creating productions that combine storytelling with art and technology.

Molmol is an artist in residence at Google Art and Culture Institute(2018) and Adobe (2017 November to March 2018), working primarily on creative applications around Augmented Reality. She is a Media Fellow at the Bric Media Center to produce content for the Brooklyn Free Speech Program, a teaching artist at The Queens Museum and Open A.I.R. Artists Services Program and a mentor at the Tisch School of the Art’s Mentor Program. She has recently become an artist member of Gibney Dance’s Move to Move Beyond Storyteller collective. Her art and work are featured on National Geographic’s Tech + Art: Obscuring Reality, Vice Media's Creator Project, Ted Talk, and the Brooklyn Free Speech Program. Her interactive works have been exhibited at the Cannes Lion’s International Festival, The London Olympic Games' Cultural Olympiad 2012, The World Expo 2022, United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 28 UAE).

When She is not in front of a computer, a soldering station, a rock climbing wall, or a neon bending shop, she volunteers for the Sanctuary for Families in New York to advocate for victims of violence and sex trafficking, and she works with survivors of gender-based violence to rebuild their lives beyond trauma.

She is a partner at YesYesNo Studio which uses technology to create wonder and delight.

Research

I am excited about both the work and the tools that create the work. I am interested in the narrative potential of interactive technology.

I am particularly interested in tools that visualize this form of corporeal writing with physical movement, habit, and strategies of our body. In my ongoing research — a collaborative endeavor with my long-time partner, we create software that takes the body as input and draws generative forms that respond to movements, gestures, and physics. It is an experiment for augmented wearable technology and a whimsical and playful tool for future theatrical performances.

Creative Inquiries

I go to my studio daily and it is a safe place for me. It is where I tinker with fabrication, open-source software, and electronics. It’s where I film myself and develop those ideas into photography and video work. Next to my workbench in the middle of the studio is a small area dedicated to movement research — I have pledged to keep my body moving for the rest of my life. Once, I had even set my mind on becoming an aerialist, hoping one day I would be able to fly through the air. However, my fear of heights steered me away from a career as a serious circus artist. But I keep an aerial silk rigged from the ceiling of my studio and practice simple mid-air tricks daily.

A perfect day for me would be a day spent building work at the studio and then to a flatshop where I rent a desk with a torch to work on neon bending and glass. I prefer doing work that requires full-body movement. Afterward, a stroll in the city, at a time of the day, north from St. Marks, south to E. Broadway, before that art zine bookstore closes, as long as I can pass the headshops, the palm readers, the bar in the basement, the Tibetan Cafe, bodegas, the waiting people by Tompkins Square Park. As long as I can keep moving!

I practice reimagining and becoming a safe space for my own body and my community. I do not engage in physical fights, nor do I have rigorous training in martial arts. I build muscles and become stronger through daily acts of art-making. I have a collection of strategies for the Art of Self-Defense through this relentless practice in various mediums: in glass, in writing, choreographing, tool-making, building and rebuilding my sense of self, filming, acting, directing and editing photography and video to preserve my own image and image of my community in my work.

Teaching and Learning

I work with the mentor program at the Tisch School of the Arts for recent New York University graduates who are international students and in their early careers as artists. I share my experience as a female-identified immigrant artist working in the intersection of software, electronics, videos, performance, storytelling, and interactive installation. I try to find answers to questions and help make connections to other professional artists and organizations. This experience brought me great joy and has always reminded me of my experience as a mentor for the artists and a teaching artist at the Queens Museum, serving museum members consisting of largely Latinos, Asian Americans, senior residents, and residents of the Queens Borough. At The Queens Museum, I taught production workshops for several years which covered contemporary media art, data collection, visualizations and self-portraits, and movement workshops, and helped artists realize their projects and publish or show their work during the museum's mentoring program. I enjoy teaching and believe in community building through learning and teaching.

I had been volunteering for the not-for-profit organization, Sanctuary for Families’ Survivor Leadership Coalition, for over a decade and as an artist advocate for Gender-Based Violence Intervention & Prevention.

Through the Survivor Leadership program, I became involved with Gibney Dance’s Move to Move Beyond Storytellers and became one of the artist members of the collective. The Storytellers, a group of advocates and creators who have experienced gender-based violence, have a growing repertory of original dance works collaboratively created over the past two decades. The group comes together regularly, in-person or online, to offer support to one another, ignite ideas, and move & create together. Through performance, the collective aims to create a supportive space for audiences and performers alike to deepen their critical consciousness, witness the power of reclaiming one’s agency, and move toward shared liberation.

I worked in collaboration with the NYU Program in Drama Therapy in partnership with Survivor Leadership Coalition and the Big Dance Theater in 2020 to produce a theater film, titled “ 9”. As a multimedia designer in the production, my method of work relies mainly on personal interviews with the nine performers to accomplish an interconnected storyline and a survivor-centered media production focus on art, trauma, and healing.