” My practice is guided by an interest in how meaning survives within systems—how it is formed, sustained, and altered by the structures that contain it. My work examines how meaning, form, and narrative are shaped by systems that assign value, legibility, and position. These social, cultural, and institutional conditions function as organizing forces that influence how things are interpreted, remembered, and shared.
I am currently working on a series of paintings, which draw from two distinct literary touchstones in American popular culture—W.E.B Dubois’ The Souls of Black Folk and Masamune Shirow’s Ghost in the Shell—intersecting in their reflections on the fate of the soul within modern systems. Within the series, I build paintings within layers of polyethylene stretch-wrap, a fragile industrial material, which I use to give physical presence to images derived from digital form. The vulnerability of the material parallels the instability of the Digital—while also suggesting the persistence of something interior within systems not designed to preserve it. These works consider how traces of human essence, narrative, or identity endure and fail as images are reduced into formats meant for circulation and legibility.”
BIO
Ayzay Ukwuoma was born in Los Angeles to an African father and a Creole mother. His early engagement with language and writing developed through the creation of public-facing non-commissioned artworks. Before fully committing to an art practice, Ukwuoma worked as a digital ink-and-paint artist in a Korean-owned animation studio during the industry’s transition from hand-painted cels to digital production, and later as a network interface designer at a major telecommunications company, where he co-designed internet modems distributed across the United States. In the early 2010s, Ukwuoma initiated a series of art placements that expanded the settings in which his work could be encountered—creating large paintings and cutting them to form smaller paintings, which he placed inside books at public libraries across European cities including Berlin, Grenoble, Lyon, Marseille, Paris, and Valencia. Within the lineage of such placement works, Ukwuoma has most recently performed a set of painting placements in 2025 in Sao Paulo, Brazil.