Von Hyin Kolk is a visual artist living and working in New York City. Kolk’s paintings address the tensions and idiosyncrasies of her multi-cultural existence. In her work, she draws upon her experiences as the child of Chinese-American immigrants. Her visual memoirs and depictions of nostalgic Cantonese dishes juxtaposed with uncanny scenes and environments are the vehicles through which she explores the margins between memory and fantasy. Through the maximal collaging of vignettes from her childhood and current daily life, she chronicles the process of assimilation as it occurs within the creation of the paintings themselves. Furthermore, her choice of material also invokes the interstice of the assimilated experience: she mainly paints on vinyl, a synthetic material which is largely manufactured in China and exported elsewhere. By using the traditional process of canvas-stretching on the vinyl, Kolk imposes a naturalization onto the material in order to synthesize a familiarity; but the chemical makeup of the vinyl remains an unprecedented and unorthodox painting surface—mimicking her concurrent realities as both a homogenous and divergent identity.