Hein Koh

Influenced by Surrealism and Pop Art, the American artist Hein Koh’s work focuses on personal experience and the sincerity of feelings, all of which she translates into candid yet ambiguous shapes. A graduate of Yale University in painting, Hein Koh turned her attention towards the three-dimensional in 2011, producing large format textile sculptures, around which she can occasionally be found striking the pose of a naked pin-up girl. Her kitsch repertoire of rainbows and hearts is thus counterbalanced by a touch of perversity that nevertheless tends more towards humor and flirtatiousness.

The recent pandemic marked a return to painting in 2020 as she engages her vegetable avatars in narrative scenarios inspired by the current state of affairs, chronicling the anguish and boredom of confinement. Employing outrageousness as a tool for female emancipation, the use of slapstick humor and the transformation of objects into subjects by means of assumed sexuality are just some of Koh’s semiotic strategies.

During an artistic career spanning fifteen years, Koh has enjoyed numerous individual and collective exhibitions, regularly orchestrated by her artist friends – Julie Curtiss, Ryan Travis Christian and Austin Lee – at the Anton Kern and Jeffrey Deitch galleries in New York (US) among others, sharing the bill with new American figurative artists such as Eddie Martinez, Emily May Smith and Louis Frantino. In 2019, she exhibited in the windows of the Rockefeller Center in New York (US).