Shing Yin Khor

Biography

The first comic Khor put online, in 2011, was a photographic one: the frames showed clay figures and sets they had built themselves. It was called “Marlowe the Monster”. A year later the artist was invited to the small press exhibition at San Diego Comic-Con.

Khor was born in Malacca (Malaysia) to a Chinese family and grew up in the Philippines. In 1999, at sixteen, they moved to the United States, have lived in California since 2006, and became an American citizen in 2012. They studied technical theatre and English at Whittier College and graduated in 2005. After that they worked as a theatrical set and prop designer.

From 2014 to 2018 the webcomic “The Center for Otherworld Science” appeared. In it, scientists experiment on the plants and animals of a place called the Otherworld. The experiments lead to successes, such as the defeat of sickle cell anemia, but are morally dubious. After an accident in which one of the workers dies, the survivors have to deal with the consequences. A reviewer for The Beat noted that the drawing is simple and at the same time very effective.

In 2018 came the minicomic “Say it with Noodles: On Learning to Speak the Language of Food”. It is about the artist’s grandmother and about how cooking for someone can be a way of speaking the language of love. For it Khor received the Ignatz Award for Outstanding Minicomic.

In 2015 Khor was an artist in residence at Petrified Forest National Park, and in 2016 at Homestead National Historical Park. Their installations and sculptures include “Hamlet-Mobile” (2016), “The Last Apothecary” (2016) and “The Gentle Oraclebird” (since 2017).

Khor leads Three Eyed Rat, a studio for installation and immersive art.

In 2019 the autobiographical graphic novel “The American Dream? A Journey on Route 66” appeared. It tells of a road trip along Route 66, partly to understand themself better and to get to know the other America, outside their home city of Los Angeles, which Khor barely knew. The pages are filled with watercolour, with pencil sketch lines visible under the finished shapes. Khor draws kitschy tourist traps, giant sculptures and abandoned roadside attractions, and tells the history of the road itself, the boom and the decline of the people living along it. Reviewers noted that the book also leads into a discussion of the author’s complicated relationship with America as an immigrant. From the same journey the book includes an episode with a motel whose sign read “American owned”, and reflections on the word “home”.

Two years later came “The Legend of Auntie Po” (2021), Khor’s second full-length graphic novel and their first historical fiction for middle-grade readers. It is set shortly after the Chinese Exclusion Act. Thirteen-year-old Mei and her father work in a logging camp in California, and she retells stories of Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox as legends of Auntie Po and her blue buffalo, Pei Pei. The book was a finalist for the 2021 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature and won an Eisner Award for Best Publication for Teens. Kirkus Reviews named it one of the best books of 2021.

In parallel Khor makes keepsake games, in which the player keeps a journal or receives letters. With Jeeyon Shim they designed “Field Guide to Memory” (2021), which won an IndieCade Award. The solo role-playing game “A Mending” (2021) invites the player to stitch their journey onto a pre-made cloth map. In 2022 Khor mailed letters to participants in “Remember August”, which also won an IndieCade Award. Later came “The Bird Oracle” (2025), nominated for an ENNIE Award, and “Gods of Nothings”, a game that involves making a mask. Khor has also worked for HuffPost, The Nib and The Toast, and the Smithsonian wrote about their recreations of other artists’ paintings in “Animal Crossing: New Horizons”.

In 2023 Khor taught at the University of Southern California and joined the “Creators in Residence” cohort at the Los Angeles Public Library. Their short film with puppets, “Geronimo Was A Beaver” (2024), won the Best Animated Documentary Award at the Doc LA festival in 2025. “The Last Fifteen Minutes”, a marionette opera and short film, was funded on Kickstarter and became Khor’s thesis project at the School of Visual Arts; in 2026 they received a Master of Fine Arts in Visual Narrative. In 2022 they were included in the Out100 list.