Courtesy: the artist and THIS IS NO FANTASY, Melbourne.

Kevin Chin’s gently disorienting paintings connect distant lands and cross-cultural references to question how we find our place in the world. His unmistakable compositions, assembled from fragments, explore how we piece together postcolonial identities and navigate global flows. He reframes landscape conventions, to interrogate how land rights and belonging are constantly contested, ultimately imagining new territories.

Kevin’s paintings are instantly recognised by his inventive use of colour, bringing signature warmth and compassion to pressing social themes. Richly layered with translucent glazes, he employs this slow working method to ‘feel his way through the image,’ teasing the meaning out of disparate elements into a cohesive vision. This imbues the paintings with emotional charge, and his skill with traditional hoghair bristles keeps his precise brushwork always expressive. The large-scale sweeping vistas are immediately atmospheric, and reward close inspection with the most meticulous of minute details.

Kevin redeploys the historical lineage of grandiose painting, but from the perspective of those minority groups that the art institution has excluded and objectified. In this way, he reclaims the oil-on-linen canon for the marginalised, to revise grand narratives in contemporary art.

Opening Event: Artist Drinks on Saturday 3 December, 2-4pm.

Follow this artist