Anthony Chiou

Anthony Chiou (b. 2003, Paramaribo, Suriname) is a Surinamese-Dutch painter based in Amsterdam, whose work explores distance, migration, and inherited memory. He is currently a participant at De Ateliers, Amsterdam, and completed his BFA at the Utrecht School of the Arts (HKU) in 2025.

Chiou builds up his paintings — varying widely in scale and format — through layers of accumulated color and texture. His works begin from a small fragment: a drawing, a photograph, a mono print, or a single sentence — not a scene that actually occurred, but an impression suspended between memory and imagination, one intense enough to demand a longer moment on canvas. Moving between thin, fluid layers of paint and thick, harsh impasto, he builds his images through a constant process of addition and removal. This process stays alive throughout the making of the work, leaving behind not a fixed scene but the texture of a memory that keeps reshaping itself over time.

This way of working grows out of Chiou's own life. Born to a Brazilian mother and a Chinese-Surinamese father, he left Suriname alone at a young age to immigrate to the Netherlands. His paintings return again and again to what had to be left behind in search of a better future — people, places, and experiences that went unnoticed at the time, but that have grown more precious and more vivid with distance. This question extends beyond himself, reaching back toward earlier generations: what did his ancestors have to leave behind as they crossed borders, and what did they wish they could have carried with them. Rather than answering this question, Chiou's paintings try to hold its weight on the canvas.

His selected exhibitions include Royal Award for Modern Painting at the Royal Palace Amsterdam (2026), Alle Richtingen at FENIX Museum, Rotterdam (2025), Best of Graduates at Galerie Ron Mandos (2025), among others. His work is included in the collection of FENIX Museum, Rotterdam.