Meticulously recording the visual detritus left behind by everyday life and living, artist Kuo Yen Fu is a compulsive chronicler of the popular faces and figures that he encountered in urban landscapes. From historical figures to athletes, politicians, and even gestures, Kuo observes instances of how manufactured impressions of personhood become the images that undergird our collective cultural memory, in order to animate our imaginations of both history and the historical. This observation is what lies at the core of ‘Kuo Yen Fu: Iconic’, a solo presentation of new works on paper by Kuo which seeks to unpack how icons come to be the currencies of contemporary media economies and visual cultures.

A genealogy of the iconic can be traced to the production of sacral images in Christian traditions since antiquity. Entering modern vocabulary via the Latin translation of ‘likeness’ from ancient Greek, an icon is a graphic unit of representation usually composed to serve as the instruments and substrates of ideological and capital reproductions—a staged and choreographed depiction of a subject optimised for dispersal and circulation, sometimes of God, mostly for people. Extending beyond its original remit of conveying the Abrahamic divine, the icons of postmodernity represent a different pantheon with a different theology, designed for consumption not transcendence. Bread and circuses at either extremes, the post-modern icon pacifies and entertains regardless of its origin; its nature is commodity.

However, it is also prone to misbehaving. Much like Hito Steyerl’s poor images, an icon rarely stays static, it is “a copy in motion”. Both object and process, an icon is defined by its status as a sign as much as its continual action of signifying what it is meant to represent, a slippery, semiotic operation susceptible to misunderstood intentions, mistaken identities, or even just mechanical errors that crept in during some intermediary steps of production or propagation. Through it all, the original subject persists as a spectral referent to its imagerial cultivars.

The problem of how real is real informs the tension running through Kuo’s works for this exhibition, which take the forms of quick, unvarnished renderings of his encounters with commonplace images and objects all around the world. Synthesising the documentarian qualities of urban sketches and the uncanny exaggerations of caricatures, Kuo astutely asks how iconic is iconic when everything has become an icon—a shell, a stage, a simulation of something more real than real.


Hito Steyerl, ‘In Defense of the Poor Image’, E-Flux Journal, no. 10 (November 2009), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/.


Curator｜Alfonse Chiu