8 September - 7 November 2020
Private view: Saturday 5 September, 2-6pm
Flowers Gallery Hong Kong, 49 Tung Street, G/F, Sheung Wan
www.flowersgallerycom
Flowers Gallery is pleased to announce its first solo exhibition of the work of Hong Kong-based artist Movana Chen. The gallery space will be transformed into an artist's studio, in which Chen has been invited to spend time, day to day, producing her artwork. The exhibition showcases Chen’s diverse body of work and offers insight into her interactive practice. Inspired by Dongba symbols, Movana Chen has drawn and created her own exhibition title. This symbol resembles a world lexicon, which is the integral component of her art of connecting people, regardless of their background or means of communication.
Body Container series, Travelling into Your Bookshelf & How Are You #1 at Movana Chen's studio. Knitted shredded maps, dictionaries and books & acrylic on canvas.
Travel and communication are important subject matters that Chen examines continuously in her practice. This is evident in the ongoing piece Travelling into Your Bookshelf, which she began in 2009 during an artist residency in Europe. For this project, Chen invites friends and acquaintances to work together through the medium of knitting, using shredded books that she was given by new friends that she made during her journey through Europe. For Chen, this creates a new way of reading and communicating. Travelling into Your Bookshelf will be continuously worked on during the exhibition using shredded dictionaries and maps. A video documenting the project from the beginning along with her sketch books will be displayed. These sketch books are edited and collaged using texts, drawings, and found objects, recording Movana Chen’s experience and memories during her art journey.
Inspired by Dongba symbols, Movana Chen has drawn and created her own exhibition title.
Examples of Movana Chen’s Body Containers, the wearable sculptures in which she performs will also be on display. Chen explains that the distinctive tubular shape of these sculptures represents a manifestation of information in modern society. Created through the process of knitting fragmented maps from different countries, they form a new communication code connecting people with different cultural backgrounds.
Body Container – Travel Maps, 2012-2014, Knitted shredded maps, 156 x 80 x 80 cm
Sketch of Body Containers - Korea, 2010
Alongside works from these existing projects, will be two new paintings entitled How Are You? #1 and How Are You? #2, which are an extension of Chen’s recent postcard project. A few months ago, Chen had just returned to Hong Kong from Europe when Coronavirus began to spread throughout the world and many countries entered lockdown. She spontaneously drew 100 postcards with rainbow-colored patterns and sent them to friends all over the world, connecting people through a tangible and physical item during a time when physical connection proved impossible.
MOVANA CHEN (b.1974) Movana Chen is a Hong Kong-based artist who studied at the London College of Fashion and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University in Hong Kong.
Her work is a multi-disciplinary fusion of media, performance, installation and sculpture which has been presented at different exhibitions, art festivals and events globally, including the exhibition at the 14th Factory, Los Angeles in 2017 and a large-scale 20,000 square feet installation KNITerature solo exhibition at ArtisTree in Hong Kong in 2013. In September 2019 Movana Chen was the recipient of an artist residence at Artspace in Sydney. Chen was one of the 30 finalists of the 2011 and 2012 Sovereign Asian Art Prize. Her works have been collected by the Hong Kong Heritage Museum, CHAT (Centre for Heritage, Arts and textile, Hong Kong) and private collectors globally.
