Kate Beynon facts for kids

Kate Beynon is an Australian artist who lives and works in Melbourne. She is known for her unique artworks that mix different cultures and ideas.

Early life and education

Kate Beynon was born in Hong Kong. Her mother was Chinese-Malaysian, and her father was Welsh. In 1974, when Kate was four years old, her family moved from Hong Kong to Melbourne, Australia.

She studied at the University of Melbourne in 1989. Later, she graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts in 1993 with a special degree in fine arts (BFA).

Art practice and career

Kate Beynon's art explores ideas about living with different cultures (called transcultural life). She also looks at feminism, which is about equal rights for women, and hybridity. Hybridity means mixing different things together, like cultures or identities.

She is famous for her drawings and paintings of a Chinese hero named Li Ji. Kate places Li Ji in modern settings. Through Li Ji, Kate shows what it's like to have a mixed Australian identity and how people find their place when they have many different backgrounds.

Kate has shown her art in many group exhibitions around the world. She has also had more than 25 solo exhibitions, where only her art is shown. She has been part of big art shows about feminism, like "Global Feminisms" (2007) and "The F–Word, Contemporary Feminist Art in Australia" (2014).

In 1995, Kate went to Beijing to learn Mandarin. There, she found the story of Li Ji in a Chinese/English textbook. This story inspired much of her later work.

Kate has received awards and grants to help her art career. In 2004, she got a grant for an art residency in Harlem, New York. In 2012, she received another grant to show her art in India. She has also been a finalist eight times for the Archibald Prize, which is a very important art award in Australia.

Her art is shown at Sutton Gallery in Melbourne and Milani Gallery in Brisbane. Her artworks are also kept in public art collections all over the world.

Artwork

Because Kate moved to Australia at age four, she grew up experiencing a mix of two cultures. Her art often focuses on her own mixed background, which includes Welsh, English, Chinese, Malaysian, and Norwegian family roots.

She gets ideas for her art stories from old Chinese myths. She then updates these myths and places them in the modern world. Early in her career, she tried out Chinese calligraphy, which is a beautiful way of writing Chinese characters. She used it to think about ideas of race and culture in her own family.

Kate also uses styles from Eastern (like manga) and Western comic books. She even includes modern graffiti in her art. Her interest in writing as an art form comes from her grandfather, who was a calligrapher. He was the last person in her family who could read and write Chinese. One of her first artworks was based on a story from her grandfather’s book, called "the foolish old man moves the mountain."

Li Ji

Since 1996, much of Kate Beynon's art has featured a made-up character named Li Ji. This character is a hero from Chinese mythology. Kate changed Li Ji to explore ideas about mixed cultures and different races.

The original myth is an old Chinese story written by Gan Bao. It's about a young Chinese girl who bravely steps outside her usual role. She saves her village by killing a giant snake.

Art critic Maura Reilly says that through Li Ji, Kate Beynon talks about important issues like multiculturalism and immigration in modern Australian society. Kate's art also deals with current topics of race and identity.

In her video Where is Your Original Home, Li Ji travels through a modern Melbourne Chinatown. In this work, Kate explores a question often asked of non-Anglo Australians: "Where are you from?" She shows how a simple question can feel unfriendly because of hidden ideas about who belongs.

Kate is also inspired by her own experiences in other cultures. When she lived in Harlem, New York, she used the styles and looks of the neighborhood in her pictures of Li Ji. For example, she added African hair braiding to Li Ji's look. This change in Li Ji shows her changing, mixed identity. Through Li Ji, Kate explores questions about cultural identity and how people see different races.

Recognition and awards

• 2016: Geelong Contemporary Art Prize for her painting, Graveyard scene/the beauty and sadness of bones.

Exhibitions

Kate Beynon has had many solo and group exhibitions. Her art has been shown in galleries and museums across Australia and in other countries like the USA, New Zealand, India, and the Netherlands.

Collections

Kate Beynon's artworks are part of many important public and private art collections. These include major galleries like the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. Her work is also in collections in the USA and Germany.