When Antonia Kuo stares into the void, a vast universe of possibility stares back. For Milk of the Earth at Chapter NY, their first solo show since giving birth, the Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist brings their photographic and sculptural works into an otherworldly dialogue grounded in ecological, physical, and familial excavation. “It felt like this exorcism of all these things that I wanted to express,” Kuo says. Speaking with me on an overcast May afternoon from the Greenpoint studio space they share with their partner and fellow artist, sculptor Douglas Rieger, our conversation pinballs through this multitude of expressions: from mining to new motherhood to the late visual and performance artist Pope.L’s 2002 book Hole Theory, a formative text for Kuo’s practice and this particular show. 

Lately, holes have been on Kuo’s mind. One layer of their latest exhibit explores the postpartum body as “a vessel of some sort that has been vacated,” emerging as a potent site of ongoing transformation. This inquiry was shaped, in part, by the bodily toll of having lived what they call “a life of milk” over the past year and a half while providing nutrition to their newborn. Ceramic mold sculptures (“Negative Array,” “Respirator”) are one way they chart their lived experience of “something being inside of me that is now outside of me.” Kuo’s interest in molds, as sculptural and conceptual forms, stems back to 2016, when they began working at their family’s metal casting foundry based in Seattle, Washington. For their preferred technique (known as investment or “lost wax” casting), the molds begin in wax before being dipped into a ceramic slurry and built into a shell, after which the wax is fired out. “The vessel itself becomes a negative for something that has been lost or vacated from the shell;” a record of the initial, now-absent form. 

In Kuo’s work, the material, environmental, and cosmic frequently intertwine. Growing up in the presence of their own Taiwanese artist mother, who studied Chinese painting and calligraphy for over four decades, Kuo grounds their ceramic sculptures, chemical paintings, x-ray film, and photograms (to name just a few of their mediums) in a core tenant of these inherited philosophies: the negative. Far from being a “vacuous void,” negative space serves the same purpose in Kuo’s work as it does in Chinese painting philosophy—space is a dynamic force field, full of potential energies, weighty with meaning. 

Actual X-ray negatives also find a home in the new show, sourced from the family foundry where Kuo now crafts many sculptures and continues to spend time in the summer. Kuo’s family’s roots in metallurgy and  engineering stem from their hometown of Butte, Montana. Butte’s history as a once-prosperous copper mining town is inextricably recorded across its landscape, especially in Berkeley Pit: an inactive open-pit mine, stretching over a mile long, that is now waterlogged with toxic water. In their painted rendition of the Montana landmark, “Pit Mine,” disordered chaos swirls in hues of chalky red, dusty pink, and sludge brown. “Radiated Field,” a vibrant chemical painting in a noxious shade of green, interrogates the often-fraught relationship between toxicity and natural beauty. Here, Kuo considers all the ways industrialization has shaped the American West and exacerbated the global climate crisis, which trickles down to the brilliantly hued waters they recall from their childhood that now provoke an unsettling mix of awe and dread. “As artists, all our materials have some type of lineage or connection to toxicity or extraction—whether it’s pigment and paint, casting or metal, various things.” They zoom out further: “If you really wanna go to the very beginning, metals came from the formation of stars, then the metals were deposited while the planet was forming, and we’ve extracted these metals from the earth.”

Concurrent with their desire to foster greater curiosity toward and understanding of our environment, Kuo has been contemplating the speed of looking. As a maker and an appreciator of art, they hope their approach to materiality—making the familiar or seemingly “natural” appear suddenly strange, unfamiliar, or altogether unnatural—prompts people to take a closer, slower look at what’s in front of them and wonder how it got there. How does Kuo approach the act of looking and noticing in their daily life, whether on the streets of their New York City hometown or while spending time in Montana? They often walk around Greenpoint, near their studio, and stumble upon materials that might later make their way into a piece. “I love street trash and detritus,” they say. I’m constantly collecting, either visually or materially, things that I see or happen upon.” 

Imprinting remains a recurring focus of Kuo’s, whether in sculptural or photographic form. “I’ve thought about the chemical paintings as records of very specific times that I engaged with the material,” they explain. This iterative photochemical painting technique, which they honed for over a decade and counting, can be “very volatile and unpredictable.” By the time any given piece reaches its “finished” state, it’s already lived many lives, in a sense. Yet rather than trying to exert control over the outcome, they embrace a “collaboration with the unknown.” The silver gelatin paper, with its ultra-sensitive capacity to record light, makes these paintings feel as though they are materializing before our eyes in real time. In my firsthand encounter with the striking “Solar Array”(2025), I stood mesmerized for several minutes by the near-translucent pale blue orbs of various sizes, which evoke the sensation of letting one’s vision readjust after briefly nodding off in the cool darkness of a midnight screening, while stray moving images leave their mark on the psyche.

Kuo credits their Buddhist mother and psychoanalyst father (a former Roman Catholic priest, who moved from Italy to New York after losing his faith) with instilling in them a high tolerance for the unknown; a willingness to not know exactly what they’re doing, where it will lead, or what’s behind the curtain. Even when uncertainty about their work sets off anxiety or fear, a common occurrence, Kuo welcomes these feelings in. “I think every new thing you make is scary, and it should be, because it’s this confrontation with a new entity. It’s a sort of conversational relationship. I think that’s a productive space to be in—one where you have more at stake between yourself and the work.”

There’s something to be said for cultivating this sense of creative spaciousness, in resisting the urge to fill in all the gaps or jump to neat conclusions. Case in point: “I walked into the gallery yesterday, and I was surprised by the show,” Kuo tells me, with a laugh. Until seeing their low-to-the-ground mold sculptures contextualized alongside the other pieces, for instance, Kuo had not yet considered their almost shroud-like qualities, evoking death, loss, and rebirth on a human scale in ways they could not fully see, at least not consciously, when creating them a few months prior. “I’m sure there’s still things that I’m going to learn from it,” they say of the show, on view through mid-June. “I’m looking forward to taking those things into the next body of work.” 

Sometimes, when peering into a void of your own making, you’re quite surprised by what you find.