Von Hyin Kolk

BIOGRAPHY

Von Hyin Kolk is a visual artist living and working in New York City. She 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. Throughout her career at Parsons and after she received notable interest for her wearable sculptures and fashion pieces from institutions and magazines including MoMa, Office, PAPER, CFDA, Vogue Italia and WWD (https://www.vonistudio.com/6819157-press). Kolk worked in fashion for several years under various monikers before recommitting to her painting practice in 2020. 

Kolk’s paintings address the tensions and idiosyncrasies of her multi-cultural existence. In her work, she draws upon her experiences as the child of Chinese-American immigrants. Her visual memoirs and depictions of nostalgic Cantonese ephemera imposed upon enigmatic spaces are the vehicles through which she explores the margins between memory and fantasy. Through the maximal collaging of vignettes of her childhood, and images she is drawn to from her current daily life, she chronicles the process of assimilation as it occurs within the creation of the paintings themselves. Assimilation is ever-occurring within any given individual to a varying degree - if time passes, assimilation will occur at some level. Kolk attempts to document her own experience with this ever evolving adaptation of the human psyche. This is evident from her choice of personal subject matter, use of motion in her compositions and implementation of variables in all aspects of her work. Kolk’s attention to paint quality mimics the tension of assimilation - that is, the way in which she allows some areas to be fully blended and rendered and other sections where she allows the “underpainting” (analogous to one’s heritage or origin) to bleed through.

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