Kara Chin was born in Singapore in 1994 and brought up in the UK. In 2018, she graduated with a BA in Fine Art Sculpture from the Slade School of Fine Art, University of London, the year she featured in Bloomberg New Contemporaries at the South London Gallery. Chin is currently based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne where her wide-ranging artistic practice explores the themes of technology and environment.
Artist Kara Chin was born in Singapore in 1994 but grew up in the UK. Chin enrolled in the Slade School of Fine Art, University of London in 2014 and graduated in 2018 with a BA in Fine Art Sculpture. Following her graduation, she relocated to Newcastle-upon-Tyne to participate in the Woon Tai Jee Art Fellowship, a distinguished year-long residency funded by Northumbria University in collaboration with the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, where she continues to base her practice.
Chin’s oeuvre includes animation, ceramics, installation, and sculpture, employing whimsical elements, unconventional scales, and dispersed references to forge clarity from chaos. In her practice, she engages with the themes of the rapid pace of technological and ecological change that define our daily existence. Her works blend ancient and future symbols with modern elements, evoking spiritual rites and tools, yet residing in a timeless realm where contemporary objects and mainstream culture coalesce. Her practice is influenced by contemporary thinkers such as Sherry Turkle, Mark Fisher, Carrie Heeter, Thomas Metzinger, Donna Haraway, Hans Moravec, and Nick Bostrom, who cleverly and humorously propose methods by which emerging technologies integrate seamlessly into routine professional and household settings. Anthropomorphic, dynamic features bring her sculptures to life, offering a lens to explore and empathise with individual experiences amid envisioned, often chaotic, futuristic scenarios. The sculptures Chin makes to explore these themes embody hybrid and mutable beings. In doing so, she interweaves elements of transhumanism and nonhuman viewpoints to construct imagined stories, sprinkled with a dose of humour. Combining kinetics, robotics, sound, and natural elements, her installations blur the lines between organic and artificial. Chin also explores technology’s role in hauntology and the eerie feel of ‘digital manifestations’. For example, her recent animations depict a future where the enigmatic behaviour of machines is rationalised through their paranormal haunting, emphasising the mysterious nature of advancing technology.
In the year of her graduation, Chin featured in Bloomberg New Contemporaries at the South London Gallery. Subsequently, with a rapid exhibition trajectory, her 2022 solo show Show Real hosted at Humber Street Gallery in Hull explored the theme of the intertwining of the worlds of reality and AI (artificial intelligence). A blend of sculpture, animation, and imagery, served as a dynamic CGI film set, echoed the disturbingly indistinguishable boundaries between authentic and artificial experiences. Every piece, from the theatrically posed gloves to the animated human expressions, underscored the pervasive, often unnoticed, integration of simulation in our daily lives. The exhibition highlighted the profound and unsettling incursion of AI, and the convenience of illusion, into our perceptions of reality, while revealing the psychological and ethical costs of this blurred existence. Chin’s 2023 exhibition Concerned Dogs at the Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art in London critiqued the escapism in facing environmental crises, linking it to blockbuster movies and pet ownership. The exhibition, rich in tech and cinematic motifs, blended eerie animations and intricate doggy dioramas. These works unravel the complex, ambiguous relationships between humans, technology, and nature. Cinematic seats symbolise abandonment; illuminated dogs depict the artifice in perceiving nature. The contrast in scale between animation and dioramas underscores human power and accountability for environmental stewardship, urging viewers beyond whimsy to urgent concern.
Chin has exhibited in the UK and internationally and is represented by Vitrine Gallery in the UK. She is a member of the Newbridge Collective Studio (an annual development programme for early-career artists). She has been the recipient of several awards and scholarships, including the Max Werner Drawing Prize, Slade (2015); Alfred W Rich Prize, Slade (2017); Duveen Travel Scholarship, UCL (2018); Woon Foundation Painting and Sculpture Prize (2018). Kara Chin is based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. In the UK public domain, her work is represented in the Arts Council Collection.