Von Hyin Kolk

About Artists Events Installation Views
Women working in a field in the center of the painting wearing a long green dress with a red pattern. On the left are large red boulders and the right side is a small home with two figures sitting outside. There are flowers in the foreground.
Westbound Towards Infinite Valley (Manifest Destiny)

ARTIST STATEMENT

Westbound Towards Infinite Valley (Manifest Destiny) addresses the tensions and individuality of her multi-cultural existence. Kolk draws upon her experiences as the daughter of Chinese-American immigrants, exploring the margins between memory and fantasy. Through progressing vignettes, from her childhood and current daily life, she chronicles the process of assimilation as it occurs within the creation of the paintings themselves. Kolk’s choice of material also references the assimilated experience: she mainly paints on vinyl, a synthetic material which is largely manufactured in China and exported elsewhere. By using the traditional process of canvas-stretching on the vinyl, Kolk imposes a naturalization onto the material in order to synthesize a familiarity; but the chemical makeup of the vinyl remains an unprecedented and unorthodox painting surface—mimicking her simultaneous realities as both a homogenous and divergent identity.

BIO

Von Hyin Kolk (b. 1997) is a visual artist living and working in New York City. Kolk has been painting and drawing since early childhood and received classical oil painting training from elementary through high school. She then attended Parsons School of Design where she received her BFA in Fashion Design with a minor in Fine Arts. Kolk had her first solo exhibition at Sister Gallery in Adelaide, Australia. Since then, she has had her paintings and sculptures exhibited at Spring Break Art Fair (2022) in New York City and has participated in various group shows throughout New York.