Artist biography

In a career spanning almost three decades, Kate Beynon’s multidisciplinary practice stretches across painting, textile, sculpture, fashion, installation, animation, and projection. The content and style of her work is informed by a syncretic approach to pictorial traditions stretching across cultures and epochs, from calligraphy to animated film, scroll painting to Surrealism.

Layered traditions of storytelling coexist within Beynon’s practice, whereby the artist employs a pluralistic approach to both narrative and material production. Her voracious approach to image making metabolises the hybridity and flux characteristic of a multicultural, postmodern lived experience. Auspicious imagery, guardian emblems and talismanic spirit figures assert an autonomous, often transcendent mode of being and presenting one’s subjectivity. Adopting a non-linear, reflexive perspective in much of her painting, Beynon holds icons and motifs in space to relate non-hierarchical ideas, a process that is further activated and expanded through immersive installations. 

This distinctively layered formalism–taking the mutable structure of symbols, emblems, and characters–often beholds both personal resonances and broader cultural significances. Beynon’s work observes and underscores the mythmaking and allegory prevalent throughout East Asian and European art history. Through often oblique means, Beynon draws on the complex visual traditions of her hybrid Cantonese-Malaysian and Welsh ancestry, while additionally referencing the significance of icons and spirits throughout the mixed ancestries of her son and husband, including Afro-Caribbean and First Nations Pima-Mexican. Featuring alongside and constantly informing her solo practice, Beynon works collaboratively with her son Rali Beynon and husband Michael Pablo in the multidisciplinary collective ‘TudoFAM’. The collaborative group work across a variety of media and scales, engaging in community and museum projects alike. They have undertaken institutional commissions for the National Portrait Gallery, City of Yarra, and Collingwood Yards.

Kate Beynon was born in Kowloon, Hong Kong, emigrating to Naarm/Melbourne in 1974 where she continues to live and work. Since her first solo exhibition at 1^st Floor Gallery in 1994, Beynon has exhibited widely across Australia and internationally. In 2017 Beynon completed her PhD in Fine Art by Research at Monash University, and she is currently Associate Lecturer in Graphic Design at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. Her work has been included in important survey exhibitions and biennials including Portrait23, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra (2023); Know My Name (2020), National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Global Feminisms (2007), Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; Liverpool Biennial (2002), Liverpool, UK; Perspecta (1999), Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney and Primavera(1996), Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, among others.

She has presented solo projects in museum and exhibition spaces across Australia including the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, Adelaide (2002), Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2008), TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville (2015); Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (QAGOMA, 2017); Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney (2017); Geelong Gallery, Geelong (2020), and most recently, Linden New Art, Melbourne (2022). Her work is included in all major state and public Australian collections, as well as international institutions including Museum MMK für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, Germany, and the American University in Washington, D.C., United States. She is.a nine-time Archibald Prize finalist, and in 2016 she was awarded the prestigious Geelong Contemporary Art Prize.