INFO
| Name | Kah Bee Chow (she/her) |
| Also known as | Kah-Bee Chow |
| Born | 1980 |
| Country of Birth | Malaysia |
| Place of Residence | Malmö |
| Ethnicities | Malaysian Chinese |
| Artform | Visual arts |
| Decades Active | 2000s, 2010s, 2020s |
ABOUT
Kah Bee Chow is a Malaysian New Zealand visual artist based in Malmö, Sweden and Penang, Malaysia. Chow’s practice considers architectural forms of shelter or protection using a poetic and refined visual language. Her work is often site responsive with a layered and iterative quality, and has included video, performance, text and sculpture.
Born in Penang, Malaysia, Chow emigrated to Aotearoa as a 12-year-old. She graduated from Auckland University of Technology with a Bachelor of Visual Arts in 2004 after which Chow exhibited frequently at artist-run spaces such as Canary Gallery and SPECIAL.
Chow’s 12-hour installation Golden Slumbers (2008) took place at 10 Haining Street in Central Wellington — once known as the Chinatown of Pōneke — opposite the location where on the 24th of September 1905, local resident Joe Kum Yung was shot and killed in a racially motivated, cold-blooded attack. Chow created a space where people could gather and sit with hot soup under a golden peaked marquee symbolically depicting the elusive ‘Sun Gum Saan’ (New Gold Mountain) — the woefully unfulfilled promise that drew many Chinese men to New Zealand in search of gold in Otago. Video interviews Chow conducted with historians and people connected to the street were screened, and Chinese plants in sacks of earth helped to create a refuge from which to contemplate the life and circumstances surrounding Yung’s passing.
Chow’s recent sculptures and installations have combined found objects with fabricated structures and furniture-like elements. From the weeping cartoon penguin to mauve, corrugated plexiglass shields in Bottom Arrangement (Top) (2021-22), her broad and poetic materiality creates spaces that pay great attention to details. Childhood memories and experiences are referred to through accompanying texts, or obliquely through details — such as in Études (2023), where the score from a failed music exam is displayed as vinyl on shop front windows.
In Portals (2022), for the exhibition Elsewhere and nowhere else, a delicate array of household materials dangled from hanging steel frames. These forms with simple yet decorative loops and s-hooks, reminiscent of chandeliers or hanging basket holders, reference colonial Sino-Portuguese or Straits architecture.
Chow has lived and worked in Malmö, Sweden since 2010, and received her Master's of Fine Arts from Malmö Art Academy in 2012. She has been awarded numerous residencies, including the Triangle France, Marseille, France (2018), Rupert Vilinius, Lithuania (2019). In 2018, Chow was the recipient of the Barbro and Holger Bäckström Scholarship, a major contemporary art prize in Sweden.
LINKS
Key works / presentations
2023 — Études, A Maior, Viseu, Portugal
2023 — Eyes Horizontal Nose Vertical, Torreloft, Copenhagen, Denmark, with Mikko Kuorinki
2022–2023 — In The City Grows A Field, Malmö Konsthall, Malmö, Sweden, group exhibition, curated by Emily Fahlén, Asrin Haidari, Mats Stjernstedt & Elena Tzotzi
2022 — Elsewhere and Nowhere Else, Te Tuhi, Tāmaki Makaurau, with Yuk King Tan, Li Ming Hu and Kah Bee Chow, curated by Vera Mey
2021 — Bottom, Krognoshuset, Lund, Sweden
2019 — GĖLĖS at Editorial, Vilnius, Lithuania
2019 — membrane under pressure, Vermilion Sands, Copenhagen, with Mia Edelgart
2016 — Overseas BF, Glovebox, Tāmaki Makaurau
2014 — The network was desperate for new hits, Dog Park Art Project Space, Ōtautahi, with Campbell Patterson
2013 — No colour blue, Robert Heald Gallery, Pōneke, with Sonya Lacey
2012 — Effeminacy, KHM Gallery, Malmö
2010 — Harshmallow, Window, Tāmaki Makaurau
2009 — Flying in a Milk Bottle, Rm Gallery, Tāmaki Makaurau
2008 — Golden Slumbers (project for One Day Sculpture), Haining Street, Pōneke
2006 — Fallout, Special Gallery, Tāmaki Makaurau
2005 — Going Straight, Canary Gallery, Tāmaki Makaurau
2005 — Dear Reader, Rm 103, Tāmaki Makaurau
Key awards
2019 — Rupert residency, Vilnius, Lithuania
2018 — Barbro and Holger Bäckström Scholarship
2018 — Triangle France Residency, Marseilles
2015 — Caribic Residency, Athens, Greece
2013 — Artist in Residence at Fabrik Burgdorf, Switzerland
