Miko Veldkamp

Miko Veldkamp’s work combines his personal life with folklore and ancestral histories, as if existing in one fantastical time and place, in order to reflect on race, privilege and historical relations between the United States, the Netherlands, Suriname and the Asian Diaspora. It’s populated by shape-shifting, skin color changing and translucent pseudo-self portraits interacting with each other in different roles, that occupy a continually evolving psychological landscape of bicycles, dairy cows, nightclubs, checkered floors, forest spirits, and tobacco and coca leaves. Playful, sensitive, dreamy and lucid, the paintings build homely and idyllic scenes that are reminiscent of Les Nabis and Expressionism, yet they escape a colonial gaze that racially and geographically codes notions of civilized and wild, joy and suffering.