A practice of becoming.
T. Cheung-Damonte works across painting, poetry, and performance from a studio in Barcelona.
T. Cheung-Damonte (b. 1999, Toronto) is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Barcelona. Painting in oils, writing poetry, performing: each form offers a different way to say what the others cannot. Trained in classical technique at the Barcelona Academy of Art and in cellular biology at Westmont College, T. brings an unlikely precision to questions of queerness, becoming, and the body.
The paintings are made on linen in careful layers; the poems arrive differently. Both are searching for the same thing: a moment of genuine contact between a work and the person standing before it.
— T. Cheung-DamonteI came to classical painting through rigorous academic tradition: years of charcoal studies, colour theory, and the kind of careful observation that teaches you how to look before you begin to see. What that training gave me was invaluable. What it couldn't hold was everything else.
I also write poems. I stand on stages and perform them. I make work that moves between disciplines because I am someone who moves between things. Between cultures, between genders, between the version of myself I was taught to be and the one I am still becoming.
Art, in all its forms, has the capacity to interrupt. A painting that holds your gaze. A poem that arrives when you need it most. A performance that leaves you feeling less alone in something you thought was yours alone to carry. These are the moments I live for, as a maker and as a person who has needed them.
My deepest hope is that something I have made offers you the same.
Open Studio
A glimpse into T.'s studio, opened to visitors to explore the work and process up close.