Profile
Hoo Fan Chon is a visual artist based in Malaysia. Hoo's research-driven projects are often set in local geographies and concern class aspiration, cultural identity, informal histories, and colonial legacy. By reframing everyday life with irony and wry humour, his works observe the oscillations and assimilations between social classes, the official and the informal, the highbrow and the lowbrow. Hoo's practice aims to “mengataskan yang kampung, kampungkan yang atas,” which can be translated as, “to make fancy the village, to make village the fancy”. The Malay words Atas (literally, “up”, but also to mean “fancy” or “upper-class”) and kampung (literally, “village”) are as much states of minds as they are class categories.
He recently completed his one-month fellowship with apexart (NYC, 2024), participated in the Ilham Art Show 2022 in Kuala Lumpur, and was featured in "Myth Makers: Spectrosynthesis III" in Hong Kong and The Oceans and the Interpreters in Taipei, Dhaka, and Lagos. His solo exhibitions include "The World is Your Restaurant" (Kuala Lumpur, 2021) and "Let Them Eat Salmon" (Singapore, 2023). Hoo holds a Bachelor's degree in Photography from the London College of Communication (2010), and he co-founded the Run Amok art collective (2012–17) in George Town.
