The Ivory Gate Painting

Michelle Loa Kum Cheung is a London based artist, recently relocated from Sydney, Australia. Loa Kum Cheung’s art is a study of the fragmentation and fabrication of memory and place, real or imagined. To inform her work, she draws on the natural world as a symbol of constant transience and decay. Loa Kum Cheung’s current practice is a response to her own dislocation from her cultural heritage and identity as an Australian with a Chinese Mauritian background. She employs the use of oil, gold leaf and pyrography in her paintings and drawings, favouring the raw materiality of wood as a base. Referencing contrasting modes of documentation, from old family photos to satellite earth imagery, Loa Kum Cheung aims to fabricate nostalgia for an imagined past and place, both familiar and alien.