Today we’d like to introduce you to Flora Kao
Hi Flora, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
As a child, I enjoyed painting and drawing. I occasionally won rodeo art and coloring contests, but my engineer parents believed art should be a hobby not a profession. My parents quashed my childhood interest in architecture and floral design and rejected college art classes. Instead, I majored in environmental science and public policy. After several years in a soul-crushing strategy consulting job, I decided I needed to make beauty a bigger part of my life. I enrolled in adult education painting classes, applied to art school, and moved to LA. My experience at Otis College of Art and Design was so inspiring and eye-opening that I decided to pursue a masters of fine arts.
One of my first oil paintings is of a breathtaking beach vista that I happened upon during one of my first visits to Southern California. Its title Serendipity captures the delight and gratitude I feel each day as an artist creating and encountering beauty. It feels full circle to have this early beach landscape from my consulting days hang at the newly opened medical center at UC Irvine where I attended graduate school to cultivate my research-based installation art practice.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
It has taken years to overcome my Confucian upbringing. I grew up believing the needs of others subsumed my own – family over self – and that I must support and care for my parents in their old age. To shift from a fiscally responsible, practical career to the unstable but emotionally fulfilling artist path required a change in mindset and an embrace of American values.
I am just emerging from the blackhole of early motherhood. For me, parenting two young children has been all-consuming. Until my kids started elementary school, time and sleep were utterly fragmented with no opportunity to make art except in the middle of night. While my parents initially discouraged pursuit of an artistic career, I am grateful for their support as grandparents. My family has traveled from Taipei to watch my kids during major installations and life changes.
Five years ago, my then-husband blindsided me with his affair and divorce papers. The grief of this sudden, shocking loss was debilitating, followed by years of high-stress, draining divorce and custody negotiations. I sought solace in making large-scale, meditative artwork. The pandemic lockdown and the subsequent deaths of my grandparents have further inspired a new body of art exploring Taiwanese mourning rituals, healing and resilience.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
I make immersive art installations as well as paintings, photographs, sculptures, videos, and artist books. My art explores our relationship with environment. I examine our impulse to order and preserve in the face of the unknown and uncontrollable. Each installation is a drawing in space made from repeating marks. In constructing moments of poetic beauty, I hope to inspire contemplation of nature and our surroundings.
My work investigates memory, longing, loss, and displacement. By crotcheting miles of vinyl tubing and twine, I translate trauma into memorial and cathartic beauty. My life-size rubbings of houses, trees, and boulders map presence and absence. My installations of sewn moss and suspended plants highlight the transient beauty of nature. I overlay street grid patterns to create imagined landscapes. My latest installations explore transcendence and rebirth after a heartbreaking season of grief and isolation. I recently installed a grove of bamboo tied with silk prayer leaves in sacred Buddhist colors at the Ontario Museum of History and Art. I am currently folding a cloud of 756 origami lotus to suspend at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery.
While I am most known for my installation work, I am thrilled to create site-specific commissions and install my paintings and photographs in the beautiful homes of private collectors.
What makes you happy?
I delight in beauty and nature. LA offers the perfect mix of scenic wonder and cultural wealth. I am so inspired by Southern California’s gorgeous hikes, bountiful wildflowers, spectacular beaches, serene forests, and lovely gardens. Every weekend offers an incredible array of art shows, theater, music, and cultural celebrations. I dedicate hours each week to watering, weeding, and planting at our neighborhood elementary school. I lead gardening and art workshops with all the students to share the wonder of nature and the creative process. It is a pleasure to mentor students at Otis College, to frame their understanding of LA’s landscape and ecology and witness their creative growth while developing projects for Friends of Ballona Wetlands.
Contact Info:
- Website: http://floratkao.blogspot.com
- Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/florakaoart
- Other: https://otis.digication.com/floratkao
