Vernon Ah Kee

Vernon Ah Kee (born 1967) is a contemporary Australian artist, political activist and founding member of ProppaNOW.

Based primarily in Brisbane, Queensland, Ah Kee is an Aboriginal Australian man with ties to the Kuku Yalandji, Waanji, Yidinji and Gugu Yimithirr peoples in Queensland.

His art practice typically focuses on his Aboriginal Australian identity and place within a modern Australian framework, and is concerned with themes of skin, skin colour, race, privilege and racism.

Vernon Ah Kee was born in Innisfail, Queensland, in 1967 to Merv and Margaret Ah Kee, who were Indigenous rights activists.

Like most other Indigenous people in Australia, the family was not included in the population census until 1971.

As well as his Aboriginal heritage, he also has some Chinese ancestry from his great-grandfather, but Ah Kee has stated that he identifies more with his Indigenous heritage, saying "I think of myself as a Rainforest Aboriginal, a Buma".

His family moved to Cairns when he was 12 years old, and Ah Kee sketched avidly at this time.

He attended only Catholic schools, in Cairns going to St Augustine's College (a Marist Brothers school ).

After attending Cairns TAFE where he learned screen printing, Ah Kee started his Bachelor of Visual Art at Queensland College of Art in Brisbane in 1996.

He majored in Contemporary Indigenous Australian art and earned his degree in 1998.

He then went on to do honours in fine art from 1999 to 2000, and then completed a doctorate in fine art from 2001 to 2007.

During his studies, he had two solo exhibitions hosted at his college's art gallery as part of his postgraduate work – whitefella normal blackfella me in 2000 and con Text in 2007.

In 2003, Ah Kee, along with other Indigenous Australian artists Richard Bell, Jennifer Herd and Joshua Herd, created ProppaNOW – an organisation dedicated to supporting urban Indigenous artists in Brisbane and combating cultural stereotypes.

Many of his text-based artworks ("word art") contain colonial language that have been manipulated and rewritten to create a secondary meaning, such as his 2003 austracism being a play on the word "ostracism", and 2009 becauseitisbitter appropriating a poem from American poet Stephen Crane to portray an Indigenous experience of contemporary Australia.

It has been suggested that the black and white text introduces the concept of racial relations in Australia and that the word play makes the audience think more deeply on the issues represented.

The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia described his text-based art as "...point[ing] to prejudices and agendas embedded in Australian society and politics. These puns and words-within-words fuse the history and language of colonisation with contemporary experiences and issues".

Ah Kee has also engaged with drawing and painting mediums to highlight the modern Indigenous experience.

fantasies of the good (2004) is a series of 13 detailed charcoal life drawings of different members of Ah Kee's family, who are all identified by name.

The series uses a mug-shot style and is suggested to reference the documentation of Indigenous Australians by some anthropologists in the twentieth century; the Indigenous people who were documented were unnamed and the works were rather referred to by numbers.

Ah Kee wanted to convey Australia's history of racism and has stated that "These drawings and what they represent are my evidence".

Ah Kee has exhibited his art at numerous galleries across Australia, including the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, and has also exhibited internationally, most notably representing Australia at the 2009 Venice Biennale and the 2015 Istanbul Biennial.

Ah Kee has a very diverse art practice, using a broad range of techniques and media such as painting, installation, photography and text-based art.

He is particularly renowned for his manipulation of colonial language and imagery to highlight racial issues in Australia.

His works are hosted in both public and private collections around the world.

His 2012 portrait, I see deadly people: Lex Wotton, depicted the titular man through bold paint strokes.

Ah Kee explained that Wotton's actions during the Palm Island Riots led to him being negatively misrepresented in the media, and the artist decided that "Lex should look bold and brave" in his portrait.

His 2012 exhibition of large, detailed charcoal and crayon portraits featured in the exhibition Transforming Tindale at the State Library of Queensland was based on that library's collection of anthropological photographs taken by Norman Tindale, and included some of Ah Kee's relatives.

Ah Kee has used video installation art, most notably in his exhibition Tall Man, to create confronting reflections of Australian racism.

In Tall Man, Ah Kee collected and edited footage from the Palm Island riots, an event that occurred after the death of Indigenous man Cameron Doomadgee in police custody, and retold the controversial story from an Indigenous perspective.

The installation played across four screens and juxtaposed a peaceful representation of Palm Island with the chaos of the riots, concluding with footage of protesters holding up signs with Christian-related statements such as "Thou shalt not covet the land no more".

Maura Reilly suggests this was to reference the hypocrisy of white Australian Christians in their treatment of Indigenous peoples.

In 2021, Tall Man was included in Tate Modern's 2021 exhibition A Year in Art: Australia 1992, an exhibition dedicated to Indigenous art relating to land rights and the 1992 Eddie Mabo High Court Decision.

His recent work, the island, also features a video installation, in which Ah Kee highlights Australia's "brutal" immigration system through the recounting of an Afghani refugee couple's story, rather than wholly focusing on the experiences of Indigenous Australians.

In 2014, his father died in a car accident.

Ah Kee suffered a heart attack in 2016 but managed to recover in time for his 2017 exhibition Not an animal or a plant.

While Ah Kee incorporates a broad range of different art mediums, from life drawings to video installations, a consistent theme across all of his artworks is his examination of racism in Australia.

Ah Kee has said that his art practice has been influenced by a wide range of artists and styles, but most significantly by other Indigenous artists such as Kevin Gilbert, Trevor Nickolls, Richard Bell and Gordon Bennett, stating that "I can see my own life and history" in their artworks.

In particular, Bell and Bennett's manipulation of colonial text and images encouraged him to broaden his art practice and experiment with media beyond drawing - the text art, in particular, is a common technique among ProppaNOW artists.

He also credits the politics of Malcolm X and James Baldwin, two prominent African American activists, as early inspirations for both his art practice and personal activism, as well as Barbara Kruger's propaganda-inspired art.

In 2017 Ah Kee drew Portrait of My Father, a task that he described as a "labour of love".