Artist Profile Wink Khing Moe

Wink Khing Moe, South of the Border, West of the Sun, 2024,
Oil on linen, 217″ x 87″ (5500 mm x 2200 mm).
Artist Statement
“Do you know I don’t know how one can walk by a tree and not be happy at the sight of it? How can one talk to a man and not be happy in loving him! Oh, it’s only that I’m not able to express it…And what beautiful things there are at every step, that even the most hopeless man must feel to be beautiful! Look at a child! Look at God’s sunrise! Look at the grass, how it grows! Look at the eyes that gaze at you and love you!” Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot
Artist Biography
Wink King Moe (b. 2000, Mandalay, Myanmar) is a trained oil painter, whimsical ceramicist, and contemporary dancer. With Chinese and Korean ancestry, born in Myanmar (Burma), raised in Singapore, and pledged citizenship to Taiwan, Wink moved to London in 2019 to pursue her education in Fine Arts.
Wink’s studio practice and writing are focussed on a particular intercultural reference that originates in subjective experience as much as the formation of collective diasporic identities. The work examines the question of belonging/longing through the lens of an imaginary colour space, utopian projections of an imaginary landscape of a speculative future. This has led to a prolific and unique body of paintings presented in spatial arrangements (paravents, often in association with exquisite sculptural pieces/ceramics), that offer a highly immersive and perspectivism colour experience, but also the sobering realism of the ‘backstage’ that punctuates a pervasive sense of the illusory.
Across all her media, Wink creates soft, busy, curious worlds, using canvas, clay and body to cultivate her boundless playfulness. Made at the Chelsea College of Arts, each of Wink’s works become a dreamlike, journeyed movement born from her cerebral fancies. As she becomes enamoured in equal passion with the structure yet curiousness of Japanese poetry, the mathematical safety of fractal art, or the endless possibilities of mythical creatures, she creates new sensations in the image of her fondness.
As a painter, Wink’s landmark piece is a series of five six-foot high panels, each representing the disorientation and whimsy of the unknown. Blues, greens, yellow, oranges, purples dart and dance in pattern and symbiosis to create worlds of unnatural natural forms seeking life beyond the here and now. Wink created her canvases from scratch, stretching Belgian linen over hand-cut wooden frames, before working in paint on each simultaneously. Born and finished as one piece, Wink’s works draw from vibrant and unknowable marine life, tessellating paint into tentacles, barnacles, thrills and flows. Each captivates the viewer by revealing itself slowly, from dancing floral foregrounds to marsh-esque, cloud-like disquiet.
To paint them, Wink herself dances, painting intensively and continuously all day for weeks on end, moving her body from panel to panel in reverie as she creates. Each panel is unique, yet tied together like a Japanese panel painting, like a screen separating us from an unknowable, spellbinding world beyond. So vivid is her artistry, that through her swirling, soft-hued paint the viewer feels able to walk among the teeming, living curiosities of Wink’s mind.
As a ceramicist, too, Wink creates easy distortion from pattern and play. Wink first turned to ceramics as she tumbled in the startings of young love, when vase-making promised a therapeutic tactility and a way to cradle her dreams and difference in the bodies of these new works. So Wink’s first pieces, big-bellied ceramic pots, were each born from the kiln as a piece of her heart, with carved poems of love and painted dream-like florals. Since then she has grown in experimentation, finding new techniques in the patisserie-like nerikomi and new forms in faceless mythical sculptures. Each new sculpture is made without forethought but instead as a product of the motions of Wink’s now, of her imaginations of other worldly existence. Each is an unknown that reveals itself to her as she repeats the motions folding and melding of colour, layer and ornament to make one, distinct and curious piece.
In her graduate show, named after Haruki Murakami’s South of the Border and West of the Sun, Wink will show paintings and ceramics alike. Like Murakami’s work, Wink’s pieces shown together will tell of the need to move forward in dream and creation, even and especially in the fluidity of the unknowable.