‘US artist Scott Kahn on late-career recognition, first Asia solo show and Hong Kong link’ by Enid Tsui
2024
Scott Kahn did not quite start from rags. At his exhibition opening on November 19, the slim, bespectacled septuagenarian said he was a pre-dental student at the University of Pennsylvania who switched to art history and graduated with a master of fine arts. But for decades, his commitment to painting—an art in which he was largely self-taught—failed to earn him recognition, let alone riches.
“For eight years I was living in my cousin’s attic. When Covid came, I was in the attic. I thought I was going to die in that attic, in poverty and obscurity. I thought they’d take me out in a cardboard box,” said Kahn, recalling years of despair.
He could not have guessed that an unlikely online friendship with Hong Kong-Canadian artist Matthew Wong that began in 2018 would spark a reversal of fortune.
Read more at South China Morning Post.
