Poh Ling Yeow

Biography

Yeow first appeared on Australian television on 13 April 2005, on the ABC programme Beat the Chef. Her auntie Kim Thoo helped her in the studio kitchen, and they cooked Ying Yang Prawns. At that point she was more an artist than a cook.

She was born on 17 December 1973 in Malaysia, into a Chinese family that had lived there for five generations; her mother is of Hakka descent. She attended SMK Convent Bukit Nanas, a convent school. At nine she emigrated to Australia with her parents and brother and settled in Adelaide, South Australia. Then came Seymour College and the University of South Australia, where she earned a Bachelor of Design degree. After her studies she worked as a freelance graphic designer, illustrator and makeup artist. Her clients included L’Oréal, Attitude magazine, the Australian String Quartet and the short film My Last Ten Hours With You. Makeup work brought her to the artist David Bromley: she prepared his models and in this way learned more about the art market. Until the age of twenty-five she used the Western first name Sharon, then went back to Poh Ling, as part of embracing her cultural heritage. She became a full-time professional artist in 2002.

She works mainly in acrylic on canvas. Her early pictures had heavily textured backgrounds; the recent ones are smoother, more refined and more detailed. They contain many Chinese motifs: the goldfish, a symbol of prosperity and good luck, lotus flowers and ponds, alongside Australian flora and fauna. A recurring character in her recent work is called The Girl (“my autobiographical twin”); Yeow speaks of her in the third person, although the character’s features are clearly similar to her own. She has explained that she created The Girl partly as a cathartic act, to embrace everything she had disliked about herself physically: the broad nose, the Asian eyes, the broad face. One of her recent series includes titles such as “Was That the Last Goodbye?”; in the Mermaid series, The Girl’s clothes are made from goldfish scales and fins.

Since her first solo exhibition in 2002 she has shown regularly at the Hill Smith Gallery, and also at the Libby Edwards Gallery. She has been written about in Vogue Australia, House & Garden, The Advertiser and mX. In 2003 she donated a work to raise funds for breast cancer research at Flinders Medical Centre, and in 2007 her painting appeared on the cover of Olivia Khoo’s book The Chinese Exotic. In 2008 she was a judge for Youthscape.

In 2009 she was chosen from more than seven thousand applicants for the top twenty of the first season of MasterChef Australia. On 18 June she was eliminated for wrongly guessing the ingredients of a minestrone, but on 1 July she returned to the programme with two other eliminated contestants. She lost the final on 19 July to Julie Goodwin and finished second.

Television followed. Her contract with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) produced the series Poh’s Kitchen (from February 2010; the second season was filmed on the road in every Australian state, as well as in Singapore and Thailand, and the third began in September 2012) and a two-book publishing deal. In 2011 she was nominated for a Logie Award as Most Popular New Female Talent, and in 2025 for the Gold Logie. In 2015 the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) launched Poh & Co., in which cooking was shown alongside the renovation of her backyard. There were also food businesses: a stall, Jamface by Poh, at a farmers’ market in Adelaide, and a cafe of the same name at Adelaide Central Market from 2016; the cafe closed on 15 October 2019. In 2019 she returned to MasterChef Australia as a mentor, and in 2020 as a contestant in the Back to Win season, placing sixth. In 2023 she began hosting, with Adam Liaw, the SBS show Adam & Poh’s Great Australian Bites. In October 2023 Network 10 announced that she would be a permanent host and judge of the sixteenth season of MasterChef Australia.

She has appeared in the films Human Touch and Peaches (both 2004) and Hey, Hey, It’s Esther Blueburger (2008), and in the short film Jackie’s Spring Palace (2009), on which she is also credited as production designer. From 2021 she has been one of the hosts of the Australian version of Snackmasters, and in 2022 she took part in I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here!