Ho Mei Kei

b. 1993, Malaysia

Born in Kuala Lumpur, Mei Kei completed a Diploma in Fine Art at Dasein Academy of Art. With a background as an art teacher, Mei Kei’s work centers around the idea of child’s play.

As an art teacher, Mei Kei was inspired by how children revealed their emotions through doodling and adopted those images into her visual language. The process of developing this visual language tapped into her own childhood memories revolving around picture books, playing with toys, doodling on exercise books, singing, and playing music. The child’s psyche is heavily reflected in her work, with the regular layout of her pieces mimicking that of the exercise books used throughout early education. Learning into idiosyncratic detail and repetition, pertinent to childhood learning and a child’s mind, Mei Kei creates mosaics of repeated objects with each new character bringing a curious deviation from the earlier, rather than being a perfect replica.

Mei Kei has participated in multiple group exhibitions over her career. For her latest solo exhibition, “New Mundane” (2020), held at TAKSU Kuala Lumpur, Mei Kei used the theme “Norma Baharu” or ‘the new normal’ to feature items we once took for granted. She has been the recipient of several awards including the 2017 Jury’s Award for Young Contemporaries (Bakat Muda Sezaman), organized by the National Art Gallery (KL). Mei Kei’s work currently hangs on the walls of private collections in Malaysia and Singapore.