Von Hyin Kolk
Von Hyin Kolk is a visual artist living and working in New York City. Kolk’s
paintings address the tensions and idiosyncrasies of multicultural Chinese
American immigrants. Her visual memoirs and depictions of nostalgic
Cantonese dishes, juxtaposed with uncanny scenes and environments, are
the vehicles through which she explores the margins between memory and
fantasy. Through the maximal collaging of vignettes from her childhood and
current daily life, she chronicles the process of assimilation as it occurs within
the creation of the paintings themselves. In addition, her choice of material
invokes the interstice of the assimilated experience; she mainly paints on
vinyl, a synthetic material that is largely manufactured in and exported
from China. While the chemical makeup of the vinyl remains an unorthodox
painting surface, in using the traditional process of canvas-stretching on the
vinyl, Kolk’s working process mimics her concurrent realities as having both
homogenous and divergent identities.