MIGUEL KUAN | Portfolio | Casa Hoffmann

Miguel Kuan

Miguel Kuan is a Colombian plastic and sound artist. His practice encompasses a wide array of materialities and media, ranging from sound installations and multimedia assemblages to electro-mechanical objects and participatory actions. Throughout his work he explores the impacts of technological saturations, industrial processes, and pollution upon ecosystems and contemporary societies, pointing towards the abundance of electronic devices, industrial materials, obsolete technologies, waste, and multimedia overloads in urban environments. Kuan carries out a field research methodology in order to gather information, materials, objects, and sound and video recordings which he later incorporates into his pieces.

As a result of his research and creation process, Kuan’s artworks consist of assemblies that integrate obsolete devices, electronic scraps, plastics, and multiple found objects, conveying incisive observations on the environmental and social consequences of mass industrial production and consumerism. His artworks ponder upon both material and immaterial phenomena, composing multimedia and multisensorial installations which conceptually and aesthetically comprise analytic standpoints towards the acritical acceptance of everincreasing industrial production and consumption in the contemporary market-driven world. His artworks have been exhibited at the Stenersen Museum (Norway), Passerelle Centre d’art Contemporain (France), the Paço da Liberdade (Brazil), and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Bogotá (Colombia), among others.

CÚMULOS

Miguel Kuan finds great interest in researching the audible and visual possibilities offered by found objects and intervened mechanisms. His work is situated at the LOW-TECH movement; he carries out out field research where he collects materials as plastics, obsolete devices, electronic scraps, and sound and video recordings, to later integrate them into his works. Throughout his project titled CÚMULOS, Kuan has elaborated multimedia installations and electromechanical assemblages in order to critically address environmental transformations within the context of ecosystemic alteration and destruction by means of agroindustrial intervention, machinery, and pollution. Kuan carries out a rereading of the landscape understood as a changing environment, reconsidering the idea of nature, and expanding its meaning to convey dissonant and mutable ruins.

As a result of his lived experiences in rural environments, Kuan has witnessed how the agroindustrial intervention of the landscape has turned evident in the disappearance of endemic species: the insects of thousands of colors that once populated his family garden -the reckless Machaca, the María Palitos, the tiger insects, the praying mantis, the giant moths and dragonflies- no longer flutter around pollinating plants and sustaining complex ecosystemic chains. As animals and plants disappeared, the presence of agrochemicals in the region became more and more commonplace: organophosphates, herbicides, and insecticides gave a distinctive aroma to the daily lives of the area’s inhabitants. Eventually, the harmful impact of chemical use on the community’s health and its environment forced to cease their use.

Upon mountains stripped of their nature, Kuan has found a landscape extinguished by its excessive exploitation, which sustains a production model that affects and exterminates natural ecosystems. He refers to death as a representative tradition throughout art history, recovering multiple emissaries of the dismal -starving dogs, rampaging horses, and ominous flies- that have warned of the evanescence of life throughout history via memento mori iconographies (recurring moralistic themes in Flemish painting between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries): danses macabres, triumphs of death and gardens of delights have announced the unpostponable quality death, beyond the ephemeral pleasures of life.

Using diverse media such as drawing, assemblage, sound experimentation, and installation, Miguel Kuan has undertaken an introspective and autobiographical process of reflection, formulating a singular language from the use of resources such as incidental noise, sound environments, and machines built to generate rhythmic and experimental structures that expand the possibilities of noise, and renew the potentials of contemporary composition.

The materialities at play within CÚMULOS point towards the reevaluation of objects considered trash, placing their reappropriation towards aesthetic artifacts as a gesture of resistance against the effects that the accumulation of toxic chemicals has left upon the landscape. Scrap metal is transformed into insects and herbicide containers become part of sound mechanisms in this quest to establish new relationships with that which has led to ecosystemic destruction.

Perecedero | Video

Perecedero (Perishable). Sound sculpture, assemblage. Recovered electronic scraps and found objects. | MAC Museo de Arte Contemporáneo

Portfolio

Miguel Kuan

Montañas Huecas (Hollow Mountains)

Multimedia installation, assemblage. Black pen ink, paper, found objects, electromechanical devices, speakers, sound.

Perro Famélico (Starving Dog)

Multimedia installation, assemblage, sound sculpture. Found objects, electromechanical devices, speakers, sound.

Hoffmann

Portfolio

Miguel Kuan

Instrumentos platillo (Cymbal instruments)

Multimedia installation, assemblage, sound sculpture. Found objects, electromechanical devices, speakers, sound. Cymbals | Video

Culto Sanguíneo (Blood Cult)

Multimedia & interactive installation, assemblage. Found objects, electromechanical devices.

Culto Sanguíneo | Video

Sonido Agro-industrial (Agro-tóxico) (Agroindustrial music [Agro-toxic])

Sound sculpture, assemblage. Found objects, electromechanical devices, sound.

Sonido Agro-industrial (Agro-tóxico) | Video

Hoffmann

From the series Sonido Agroindustrial

Sound sculpture, assemblage. Found objects, electromechanical devices, sound.

Sound sculpture, assemblage. Found objects, electromechanical devices, sound.

Perecedero | Video

Perecedero (Perishable)

Sound sculpture, assemblage. Found objects, electromechanical devices, sound.

Sonido Agroindustrial | Video

Hoffmann

From the series Sonido Agroindustrial

Multimedia installation, assemblage. Found objects, electromechanical devices, speakers, sound.

Espíritu de las cosas, from the series Sonido Agroindustrial

Sound sculpture set, assemblage. Found objects, electromechanical devices, sound.

Espíritu de las cosas, from the series Sonido Agroindustrial

Espíritu de las cosas, from the series Sonido Agroindustrial

Sound sculpture set, assemblage. Found objects, electromechanical devices, sound.

Casa Hoffmann

Portfolio | Miguel Kuan

Espíritu de las cosas, from the series Sonido Agroindustrial

Sound sculpture, assemblage. Found objects, electromechanical devices, sound.

Casa Hoffmann is an independent space located in Bogotá, dedicated to the production, exhibition, and divulgation of contemporary art projects commissioned to curators and researchers. Its exhibition cycle consists of curatorial projects that establish dialogue axes among local and international artists, based on transversality as a conceptual framework to contribute to creative innovation, and to cultural and social progress. Parallelly, Casa Hoffmann is specialized in designing and developing projects where art, science, and technology interact, promoting artists that delve into those research fields and understanding art as a means of reflection on contemporary issues.