Mia Khin Boe Walking about

7 March –
11 April 2026

Sutton Gallery is pleased to present Walking about, an exhibition by Mia Khin Boe. In her third solo presentation at Sutton Gallery, Boe draws on a variety of emotive visual content ranging from historic colonial documents to 1970s Australian cinema. Punctuated by personal experience, Boe wields the reflexive nature of figuration to chart an emotional spectrum spanning grief, resilience, nostalgia and desire.

In the Small Gallery, the work Australia’s Proclamation to the Aborigines 2026 sees Boe revisit an early nineteenth century pictogram employed by George Arthur (1784–1854, Governor of present-day lutruwita/Tasmania, then Van Diemen’s Land) to visually articulate the ostensible equal consequence of violent crimes for both settler and first peoples. Schematised in a rudimentary four-strip cartoon, the lithographic document emerged at a juncture where the first peoples’ population of lutruwita was being systematically decimated by settler colonialist violence. Boe’s reconstruction of this communication tool reflects a damning, desolate contemporary context, with both encounters of violence resulting in the indiscriminate execution of the indigenous subject. Framed by the celestial night sky, Boe hints at the cyclical nature of state violence continually impacting first nations communities throughout Australia.

Vignettes of personal memories, spiritual imaginations, and filmic source material reverberate across the Large Gallery. Varying in detail and scale, Boe’s figuration sublimates a deeper, psychological resonance bubbling under an opaque surface. Using portals, horizons, and voids, Boe funnels ideas between the limits of depicted scenes. Similarly, shadows, echoes, and truncated limbs bridge disparate, apparitional worlds, each unfolding and revealing themselves at once. Throughout Walking about, Boe supplants the physical constraints of the figure, presenting bodies consumed by a sense of reflection and interiority. In turn, her paintings provide generative sites where narrative builds and emotion swells.

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Biography

Mia Khin Boe is an artist whose cultural inheritances and disinheritances are the focus of her work. Of Butchulla and Burmese descent, her art offers an oblique response to the historical and ongoing colonial violence inflicted upon the lands and peoples of these cultures. Born on Yuggera/Turrbal Country, Brisbane, and now living on the lands of the Kulin Nation in Melbourne, Boe is concerned with uncovering ignored, forgotten, and denied realities, often moving between social realism and speculative fiction to imagine futures lost.

Boe’s reflexive approach to image-making frequently draws on stories of family to explore the poles of connection and loneliness, imbuing her painting, installation, sculpture and printmaking with a poetic and deeply personal resonance. Representations of the figure as elongated and unworldly embody these familial stories, whereby Boe situates both spirit and human form in stylised environments reflecting the extremity of experience.

Since receiving a Bachelor of Art (Art History) from the University of Queensland in 2020, Boe has exhibited frequently throughout Australia. In 2021, Boe was a recipient of the Brett Whiteley Travelling Scholarship from the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and in 2024 the artist was awarded the Fiona Foley Residency, undertaking a residency on K’gari and at the Hervey Bay Regional Gallery. Boe was a Studio Artist at Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne, between 2022 and 2024, following which she was selected for the 2025 Gertrude Edition.

Boe has presented significant solo projects in public institutions including the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, and the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane. Her work has been included in notable curated group exhibitions, including And Still I Rise, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2025; Blak In-Justice, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 2024; Thin Skin, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, 2023, and From the other side, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne, 2023, among others.

Examples of her work are found in public and private collections across Australia and overseas, including Kadist, San Francisco/Paris; Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth; University of Melbourne, Melbourne; Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne; Art Gallery of Ballarat, Ballarat; University of Queensland, Brisbane; University of Western Australia, Perth; City of Darebin, Melbourne, and Artbank, Melbourne.

Artist’s profile