“My work has to communicate locally as well as internationally; even so I want to achieve a yin yang harmony between realism and abstraction in one piece of art.”
Kit-Ling Tjon Pian Gi studied Visual Art and Art Education in Suriname and the Netherlands (1972 – 1979). She started her career as an art teacher and lecturer, but became a full-time visual artist in 1988, with an emphasis on painting & drawing and has been involved in multidisciplinary art projects since 1996. In 2005 she added video film & video installation as a medium to her work. From 1998 to 2017 Kit-Ling was the secretary of the FVAS (Federation for Visual Artists in Suriname).
Recurring themes in her work are nature, in its physical as well as its spiritual form, the various cultures of Suriname, and women, especially the strength of women. For some time Kit-Ling also focused on creating a fusion between visual art and the art of words, which resulted in the publication of the books: ‘The Strength of Women’ (2009), and ‘Short Stories’, a bundle of poems (2012).
Kit-Ling has exhibited nationally and internationally, and in 2011 she was an artist-in-residence at the Vermont Studio Center in the USA. In 2012, she was the featured visual artist within the 13th International Conference of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars (ACWWS). In 2013, Kit-Ling received the Bridget Jones Travel Award from the Society of Caribbean Studies in the UK. In August of 2019 the artist had a large solo exhibition at Readytex Art Gallery named One can make difference.
Discover more on Kit-Ling on her website.
Read: Self-portrait of the artist speaking in the third person
