We talked with Oakland-based Chloe King about friction in materials, Black and Queer visual culture, surviving cancer, and letting work become vulnerable.
Q: Let’s start with a few basic details: where are you based and what are you working on?
A: I’m based in Oakland, CA, though my work and community still span Seattle and the Pacific Northwest. Right now, I’m deep in my thesis year at California College of the Arts where I’ve completed my MFA in Fine Arts and am finishing up an MA in Visual and Critical Studies. My most recent experiments in the studio include large-scale paintings, speculative writing, and immersive installations. I’m building on research around Queer nightlife, speculative fiction, and body horror to explore how desire, world-building, and Black futurism play out in both visual culture and lived experience. Think: techno dance floors, prosthetics, makeup, memory, performance, portals.
Q: Your work incorporates an abundance of materials, how do media choices factor into your creative process?
A: Media choice is often about friction for me—how textures collide, contradict, or extend the body. I use airbrushes, fake nails, iridescent gels, synthetic hair, old T-shirts, rhinestones, sometimes latex or silicone. I’m interested in how “ugly” or synthetic materials—things coded as excessive, femme, or disposable—can actually carry immense power. Painting becomes a kind of cosmetic surgery: stretching, glitching, distorting. I found out I had cancer in my first year of grad school. I went through a number of new to me medical experiences, and the oxys they had me on gave me crazy dreams. Dreams of lush upper-middle-class carpet, crystal cavern DDR arcades, and becoming a troll doll with my best friend Hann via crystal bellybutton body mod. I think it was my brain’s way of processing the medical trauma and also grieving the loss of a social life. Queer nightlife had been a big part of how and where I formed community prior, and I missed it. I’m not loyal to traditional media because my references (nightclubs, subcultures, the internet, fantasy) resist purity anyway. So I let my materials act like characters—costumed, performed, unstable.
Q: There’s a glitchy and surreal quality to your paintings, how do you feel you fit into the lineage of figurative painting?
A: I think of myself less as a figurative painter and more as someone using the figure to test what’s still legible when identity breaks down. I’m influenced by a lot of Black and Queer visual culture—photographers like Samuel Fosso, theorists like José Esteban Muñoz—but also by rave flyers, surveillance footage, and drag transformation videos. My figures often exist in states of fragmentation or flux, and I intentionally let them fall apart because that’s what bodies and identities do in real life. We are a nebulous people. The art world’s general rhetoric surrounding identity in relationship to figurative painting kinda gives me the ick, to be honest, so I’ve stopped engaging with it. As I’ve continued to make figurative work, I’ve found myself more invested in the theater of becoming. I’m interested in a kind of speculative figuration—something closer to posthuman body horror than classical portraiture. If I’m in a lineage, it might be the one where the body is the site of sci-fi style experimentation, not representation. Long story short, I probably just have oppositional defiance disorder.
Q: Tell us about the inspiration or motivation behind your current body of work—are these invented characters or connected to people you’ve encountered?
A: It’s a bit of both. Many of the characters emerge from real people I’ve danced beside or watched perform at underground Queer events. Friends, family, lovers, strangers, all end up mashed in. Others are speculative—problematic fantasies of who I’d like to become, or who I fear becoming. They’re often composites, built from nightlife documentation, selfies, dreams, or fragments from my own history as a cancer survivor and nightlife worker. I’m interested in what happens when you push a body past its legibility—what kinds of truths emerge when identity fails to stabilize in the way we’re conditioned to believe it will or should. There’s always a sense of longing and estrangement in the work, but also a lot of joy and humor. A lot of it is about survival, and how we costume ourselves through it.
Q: What’s the most illuminating experiment or risk you’ve taken in your work?
A: The most illuminating risk has been letting the work become more vulnerable—and less art world-white-cube-clean (yuck). My brain just doesn’t work that way. I’m no longer concerned with making exclusively sellable work or work that’s easy to grapple with. Cancer’s a bitch and life’s too messy to sweat the small shit. Painting is a ridiculous job to have. I only paint ideas that make me laugh now, and that’s been really working for me. I’m letting the work get softer, stranger, more embodied. I’m also leaning into performance and immersive installation—building out fragmented environments, sound, and lighting, creating conditions that mirror the nightclub: fleeting, overwhelming, intimate. There’s risk in making spaces people can sit in emotionally, not just look at conceptually. I’m excited to keep playing with black light reactive pigments and showing paintings in blacked-out rooms with loud music.
Q: What artists/writers/creatives/people inspire you and why?
A: So many. Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta’s book Together Somehow Music, Affect, and Intimacy on the Dancefloor is an incredible deep dive into intimacy on the dancefloor. Octavia Butler’s beautifully fucked up stories are always a comfort read for me, especially the one about the alien bot flies. David Cronenberg’s exploration of body horror in Naked Lunch and Videodrome is something I continue to revisit. I really love Mika Rottenburg’s sense of sound and texture in her video work. The drag performers I’ve worked alongside—especially trans femmes of color—whose art-making often happens in real time, under impossible conditions. My mentors and peers. My friends. And the people who protest in the morning and keep showing up to dance every night, even when everything is falling apart. That kind of endurance is art to me.
Chloe King (b.1999, lives and works in Oakland, CA) is an interdisciplinary artist who typically works between painting and photography. King received her B.F.A in 2021 from Cornish College of the Arts and is currently a Dual Degree MFA+ MA Candidate at California College of the Arts. King has participated in a number of shows and public art events including, Fools Gold, Institute of Contemporary Art, San Francisco, CA (2024), Public Dreams of Fractured Futures, Wa Na Wari, Seattle, WA (2022), TIME CAPSULE, Photographic Center NorthWest, Seattle, WA (2021), CVA School of Art Student & Emerging Artists Exhibition, Chautauqua, NY (2020).
