Arthur Ou at Eleni Koroneou Gallery

Artist: Arthur Ou

Exhibition title: The World Is All

Venue: Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens, Greece

Date: June 14 – September 14, 2019

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens

Eleni Koroneou Gallery is pleased to present the first solo show of the Taiwanese artist Arthur Ou, titled “The World Is All”.

Arthur Ou works in photography, painting, sculpture, and installation, and explores photographic seeing and how it shapes our relationship to the world. Ou deploys photography within the contexts of these differing elements to elicit questions concerning modernism, assimilation, historiography and documentation. For his current exhibition, Ou will show photographic works from two different series.

The Primer series was made with multiple exposures through a 4×5 inch view camera, adding at least three layers of exposures of “erratic” glacial rock surfaces from around New York City. The resulting prints are then hand tinted in specific areas to give emphasis to certain forms, in particular the wires, within the picture space, treating the primed surfaces like a canvas.

In the other gallery space, Ou is presenting a series of portraits produced over the course of the past five years. All the portraits are of photographers absorbed in the act of reading Ludwig Wittgenstein’s 1921 book, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The portraits were made in various locations in the world, both interior and exterior and depict the subjects in fixed moments in time, each engaging with a specific philosophical proposition in the text. The series has recently been published as a book by Roma Publications, designed by Julie Peeters, with a text by Walter Benn Michaels.

Arthur Ou was born in 1974 in Taipei (Taiwan) and is based in Queens, New York. He has exhibited internationally, most recently in the 2018 Queens International at the Queens Museum, “99¢” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit, and “Astoria” at the Grazer Kunstverein in Graz, Austria. His work has been featured in publications including Artforum, Aperture, Blind Spot, Camera Austria, and Art in America. His work has also been considered in published surveys “The Photograph as Contemporary Art,” by Charlotte Cotton, “The Beauty of a Social Problem: Photography, Autonomy, Economy,” by Walter Benn Michaels, and “Photography is Magic,” also by Charlotte Cotton. Ou has published critical texts in Aperture, Afterall.org, Artforum.com, Bidoun, Foam, Fantom, Words Without Pictures, and X-Tra. Roma Publications will publish his first book, “The World Is All That Is the Case,” in June 2019. Ou received his MFA from the Yale School of Art. He is an associate professor of BFA Photography at Parsons School of Design in New York City.

Arthur Ou, The World Is All, 2019, exhibition view, Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens

Arthur Ou, Primer, 2018, Hand-tinted gelatin silver print, 38 x 48 cm (image), 50.8 x 61 cm (framed)

Arthur Ou, Michele Abeles reading 5.634: This Is Connected With the Fact That No Part of Our Experience Is at the Same Time A Priori. Whatever We See Could Be Other Than it Is. Whatever We Can Describe at All Could Be Other Than It Is. There Is No A Priori Order of Things., 2014, Gelatin silver print, 20.3 x 25.4 cm (image), 40.6 x 50.8 cm (framed)

Arthur Ou, Brandon Lattu reading 4.116: Everything That Can Be Thought at all Can Be Thought Clearly. Everything That Can Be Put Into Words Can Be Put Clearly., 2015, Gelatin silver print, 20.3 x 25.4 cm (image), 40.6 x 50.8 cm (framed)

Arthur Ou, Phil Chang reading 5.632: The Subject Does Not Belong to the World: Rather, It Is a Limit of the World., 2014, Gelatin silver print, 20.3 x 25.4 cm (image), 40.6 x 50.8 cm (framed)

Arthur Ou, Moyra Davey reading 4.114: It Must Set Limits to What Can Be Thought; And, in Doing So, to What Cannot Be Thought. It Must Set Limits to What Cannot Be Thought by Working Outwards Through What Can Be Thought., 2015, Gelatin silver print, 20.3 x 25.4 cm (image), 40.6 x 50.8 cm (framed)

Arthur Ou, Shannon Ebner reading 6.36311: It Is an Hypothesis That the Sun Will Rise Tomorrow: and This Means That We Do Not Know Whether It Will Rise., 2015, Gelatin silver print, 20.3 x 25.4 cm (image), 40.6 x 50.8 cm (framed)

Arthur Ou, Annette Kelm reading 3.001: ‘A State of Affairs Is Thinkable’: What This Means Is That We Can Picture It to Ourselves., 2014, Gelatin silver print, 20.3 x 25.4 cm (image), 40.6 x 50.8 cm (framed)

Arthur Ou, Luisa Lambri reading 5.63: I Am My World. (The Microcosm)., 2015, Gelatin silver print, 20.3 x 25.4 cm (image), 40.6 x 50.8 cm (framed)

Arthur Ou,Lisa Oppenheim reading 3.326: In Order to Recognize a Symbol by Its Sign We Must Observe How It Is Used With a Sense., 2015, Gelatin silver print, 20.3 x 25.4 cm (image), 40.6 x 50.8 cm (framed)

Arthur Ou, Michael Queenland reading 3.01: The Totality of True Thoughts Is a Picture of the World., 2015, Gelatin silver print, 20.3 x 25.4 cm (image), 40.6 x 50.8 cm (framed)

Arthur Ou, Joachim Schmid reading 6.51: Skepticism Is Not Irrefutable, but Obviously Nonsensical, When It Tries to Raise Doubts Where No Questions Can Be Asked. For Doubt Can Exist Only Where a Question Exists, a Question Only Where an Answer Exists, and an Answer Only Where Something Can Be Said., 2014, Gelatin silver print, 20.3 x 25.4 cm (image), 40.6 x 50.8 cm (framed)