Melbourne-based artist Kevin Chin turns dreams into reality – literally. Specialising in painting dreamscapes – scenes with surreal and dreamlike characteristics, he’s held solo exhibitions around the country and across the globe. His stunning works can also be found in collections including Australian Parliament House, Artbank, and La Trobe Uni Museum of Art.
Tell us about your background and career to date?
While most of my exhibiting experience has been around Australia, I’ve also had solo exhibitions in Japan, Singapore, and the USA. My paintings are very much about how a sense of place can cross borders, and forms first in the imagination, so creating experiences all over the world is very generative for my work.
I graduated from Victorian College of the Arts in 2006, and am represented by This Is No Fantasy in Naarm/Melbourne and Martin Browne Contemporary in Gadigal Country/Sydney.
What advice would you give to someone wanting to start out in your field?
Take yourself out of your comfort zone and open yourself up to as many new experiences as possible. Residencies can be a great way to spend time in other countries on a limited budget - especially if you can get funding! I know they’ve really helped push my own work in new directions over the years. Res Artis has terrific search filtering tools to discover vetted residency programs that suit your specific needs, and their international headquarters are in Naarm/Melbourne.
What do you draw inspiration from?
I’m largely influenced by contemporary magical realism literature, authors like Haruki Murakami. This poetic way of creating worlds that resemble our own but are slightly awry - and using this as a way to step outside of ourselves and re-examine the way things are. This genre also emphasises the voices of minority groups, so inverting landscapes also provides a different perspective, as a way of questioning dominant narratives and the societal structures that we take as given.
What work of yours are you most proud of?
It always seems to be the painting I’m currently working on! I guess my method of slowly working up the image through a series of glazes allows me to have a conversation with the painting over time. It tells me what it needs – it’s as much about looking and listening, as applying paint. Each painting takes me around two months, so by the end we’re in a serious relationship! I think this prolonged connection allows me to be very conscious of the energy that I’m bringing to the work, lending the finished paintings a warm, meditative quality.
Tell us about your work from your recent Gippsland Art Gallery exhibition?
I’m interested in this contemporary human condition of perpetually feeling in-between places. The paintings are testament to the mixed cultural traces we each inhabit, through our memories, our experiences, our ancestry, or even just our interests – both individually and through our collective consciousness. By assembling fragments from distant lands, I wanted to explore how we piece together our place in the world.
Where can we see your work at the moment?
I post everything on my website and am slowly getting better at Instagram!
What are you currently working on and what do you have coming up?
I’m excited about the biggest showing of my paintings to date at Town Hall Gallery (Hawthorn) here in Naarm/Melbourne opening in May this year. In addition to a new series, across all three gallery spaces there’ll be a curated selection from the past 5 years that draw out themes of journey in my work.
My new series will then travel to Gadigal Country/Sydney for a solo exhibition at Martin Browne Contemporary in October 2024. These new paintings evoke a parallel dimension, that magical feeling you get out in nature that another world could be hiding between the crevices.
What did your Creative Victoria grant enable you to do?
The grant funded new work for my first solo exhibition at a regional public gallery – Gippsland Art Gallery. I started off looking at how people have been moving further out from cities the last couple of years, as people have been trying to avoid lockdown conditions and have been more mobile with working from home arrangements. In my paintings, I mixed together source imagery from metropolitan, regional and rural Australia to reference the greater fluidity between these classifications shown by these recent trends. While I’ve always been interested in hybrid ways of seeing geography, this provided an alternative way of approaching the subject matter.
In three words, describe Victoria’s creative community.
Consistently exceeding expectations!
Kevin Chin was a recipient of a Creative Workers Fund grant through Creative Victoria in 2021.
His upcoming exhibition, The Long Way, will be shown at Town Hall Gallery (Hawthorn, Victoria) from 8 May – 28 July 2024.
Kevin’s solo exhibition, Mystic Meander, runs at Martin Browne Contemporary (Paddington, NSW) from 10 October – 2 November 2024.