Von Hyin Kolk 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. Throughout her career at Parsons and after she received notable press for her wearable sculptures and fashion pieces from institutions and magazines including MoMA, Office, PAPER, Vogue Italia and WWD . Kolk worked in fashion for several years under the names "Voni Studio" and "Veronica H. Lee", before recommitting to her painting practice in 2020.
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. Kolk will be exhibit in a two-person show at Tchotchke Gallery, Brooklyn in July of 2023. In 2023, Kolk was featured on Artsy's Artists on the Rise page.
Kolk’s paintings address the tensions and idiosyncrasies of her multi-cultural existence. In her work, she draws upon her experiences as the daughter of 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. Furthermore, her choice of material also invokes the interstice of 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 concurrent realities as both a homogenous and divergent identity.
Please email vonhyinkolk@gmail.com for inquiries.