Kate Beynon’s transcultural life and art

In a painting on the left-hand side of the room a woman sits in a half-lotus position. By her side are two green dogs, and a gold dragon curls around her body. It looks like a scene from a comic book or fantasy novel. This mystical, technicolour vision is Kate Beynon’s Self-portrait with guardian spirits, currently on show in Archie 100: A Century of the Archibald Prize at the National Portrait Gallery.

With its blend of European and Asian influences, this work is emblematic of Beynon’s portraiture practice, which explores the politics of race and globalisation, hybrid identity, feminism and family history. Born in Hong Kong in 1970 to a Chinese-Malaysian mother and a Welsh father, Beynon emigrated with her family to Australia as a child. Reflecting her transcultural identity, her work lends itself to a wide range of artistic techniques. In Self-portrait with guardian spirits, for example, she employs elements of traditional Chinese painting and animation to depict her positionality in contemporary society and pay homage to her culturally diverse ancestors.

In applying the transculturality of her life to her art, Beynon has established a creative antiracism. Much of her work critiques xenophobia, especially when it exists in the form of the repetitious question, ‘Where are you from?’ Personally, this is perhaps what moves me most as a viewer of her work. I am a mixed-race Australian creative, my South Asian and Celtic roots rendering me somewhat unintelligible in a white-dominated country. When I first encountered Beynon’s work, I was struck by how much she resists categorisation as both an artist and an individual living in Australia. Clearly, this is intentional on her part: why bother syphoning yourself into a pre-existing box when it is so much more interesting to build your own?

But the impact of Beynon’s work travels beyond politics. Her distinctive use of Chinese and Celtic symbols, calligraphy, fashion, animation, film and comic book elements have accompanied her art practice since she graduated from the Victorian College of Arts in 1993. Dragons, for example, a mythical creature common to both Eastern Asian and Celtic cultures, appear in many of Beynon’s works. Fashion and textiles were central to Self-portrait with studio spirits, a finalist in the Darling Portrait Prize 2020, in which her studio spirits – ‘inspired by various creatures and shape-shifters from mythic, supernatural and sci-fi tales’ – are reinterpreted as ‘wearable art forms’. In the accompanying artist statement Beynon wrote that the self portrait ‘contemplates life as a contemporary woman artist of mixed cultural identity, and the ongoing quest to explore ideas, channel creative energy, and balance art in life’.

These guardian spirits reappeared in Beynon’s Fantastic Faces Space, which was created for the National Portrait Gallery’s Portrait 23: Identity exhibition in 2023. This immersive, interactive installation invited visitors to make ancient-futuristic hybrid figures on the wall using Beynon’s colourful motifs of eyes, lips, noses, hands, botanical elements and symbols, based on the artist’s original watercolours. As Beynon noted in an interview with Portrait 23: Identity curator Penelope Grist, ‘I’ve always felt drawn to lucky symbols, charms, creatures and guardian figures in stories, adapting these as talismans throughout my work’.

Another prominent character throughout her oeuvre is Li Ji, a contemporary interpretation of a warrior girl from a fourth-century Chinese fable, who slays a giant python and saves her community. The presence of Li Ji saw Beynon’s practice extending from the personal to the collective – outside her own identity and family towards the cultures that exist around her in the wider world. While undertaking a residence in Harlem, New York in 2004 she created the Hybrid Faces Project, a series of portraits of Li Ji combined with various skin and eye colours, hair and clothing to reflect the multilayered cultures in Harlem. This approach can also be seen in Beynon’s Warrior Women Collective (2006–07), which was created for Global Feminisms, held at the Brooklyn Museum in 2007. For this collective exhibition, which saw 80 female artists from around the world come together to make art-as-feminist commentary, Beynon presented nine oval portraits of female figures blending traditional and contemporary forms and styles. A comment on her cross-cultural experience, the works depict what Beynon characterises as ‘female versions of traditional Chinese guardian figures’, channelling Li Ji’s warrior-girl spirit.

The concept of hybridity in Beynon’s practice includes the experiences of her husband Michael Pablo and their son, artist Rali Beynon, who share Afro-Caribbean, First Nations Pima-Mexican, Creole/French and Irish heritage. Their beloved Staffy-cross, Tudo, often appears in Beynon’s works as a guardian dog, symbolising protection (the green lion-dogs in Self-portrait with guardian spirits were based on Tudo, who sadly died in 2023). That year, Beynon collaborated with Rali to create Spirits Shapeshifting, a watercolour and digital animation projected onto the National Portrait Gallery’s façade with a soundtrack created by Michael. Commissioned by the Gallery for the 2023 Enlighten Festival, the huge outdoor projection used a range of family portraits, mythical, animal and supernatural figures, drawing on their diverse cultural backgrounds.

Connecting storytelling, family and cultural identity, Beynon’s creative practice pushes the boundaries of portraiture, reconciling past and present, masculine and feminine, east and west. Reflecting contemporary life, her distinctive visual language demonstrates that transculturality is reality.

Archie 100: A Century of the Archibald Prize is on show at the National Portrait Gallery until 28 January 2024.