Chemu Ng’ok

Chemu Ng’ok (born 1989 in Nairobi, Kenya) is a Kenyan painter and draughtsperson whose practice explores the sociopolitical, physical, psychological, and spiritual dimensions of human relationships. Working primarily in oil, acrylic, watercolor, ink, and drawing, Ng’ok creates paintings in which individual and collective bodies emerge through loose, energetic lines, translucent layers, shifting color, and unstable figurative forms. Her subjects frequently appear caught between recognizable bodies and abstraction, producing what she has described as “psychological landscapes” in which internal states, social structures, memory, and political tension overlap.  The body is central to Ng’ok’s visual language. She considers it both intimate and public: a physical form shaped by geography, race, gender, institutional power, and the expectations placed upon Black bodies. Her earlier work developed the concept of the “Psychological Riot,” a framework through which she examined how patriarchal and racist systems are internalized and how resistance might occur within the psyche as well as publicly. Paintings responding to political tension surrounding Kenya’s 2017 elections considered how state power, military presence, fear, and collective unrest register psychologically within individuals.  Over time, Ng’ok’s paintings have moved toward increasingly ambiguous territories in which the political coexists with memory, spirituality, kinship, transition, and collective experience. Works shown in To Witness in Miami Beach depicted processions and gatherings recalling weddings, births, funerals, parades, and other transitional rituals without specifying exactly what event is taking place. Her paintings deliberately resist fixed narratives: figures float, merge, disappear, reappear, and inhabit dreamlike environments, while unconventional skin tones complicate expectations surrounding Black figuration. Her 2026 exhibition Those We Remember or Are Yet to Meet extends these concerns through paintings about community, family, ancestry, remembrance, and the afterlives of people who came before us.  Ng’ok earned both her BFA and MFA in Painting from Rhodes University in South Africa, completing the MFA in 2017. Her graduate research, A Counter-narrative Analysis of Psychological Riot in Contemporary Painting, helped formulate ideas that continue throughout her practice. She has since exhibited at the New Museum, ICA Milano, Kunstmuseum Basel, Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute, Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Goodman Gallery, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, CENTRAL FINE, and other venues internationally. Her honors include the Mellon Foundation’s Visual and Performing Arts of Africa Masters Bursary, Raymond Pullen Bursary, Helen Timm Award, and selection for the Henrike Grohs Art Award shortlist. She lives and works in Nairobi.