EXHIBITION
TRAVELLING INTO YOUR BOOKSHELVES
MOVANA CHEN installations
19 September~17 October 2015
Travelling into your bookshelf 「遊閱你的書架」 2009 - ongoing
“Travelling Into Your Bookshelf” is my touring project that started in 2009 which aims to create dialogues around memories of books donated by people from all over the world. It is an ongoing project that aims not to have any limits in terms of location or format. Through meeting friends and strangers and reading their books, I attempt to establish relationships with them and learn about their cultures by exploring their memories and maintaining a two- way communication. Through my knitting process with the participants, I hope to create a new way of reading and enabling the viewers to re-examine the existing communication barriers between people.
Movana Chen is a Hong Kong-based artist who studied fashion design at the London College of Fashion and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University in Hong Kong. Movana started her knitting projects in 2004 by making “magazine clothes”, a genre that involves playing with deconstructing and reconstructing of meanings and content by knitting shredded magazine paper. Her work is a multidisciplinary fusion of media, fashion, performance, installation and sculpture which has been presented at different exhibitions, art festivals and events globally.
She was invited to represent Hong Kong at the Seoul Fringe Festival in 2007. Her recent solo projects include at ArtisTree (Hong Kong), Chinart LaGalerie (Paris), Shin Hwa Gallery (Hong Kong) and Pekin Fine Arts (Beijing).
She has also participated in group-exhibitions at the Frankston Arts Centre (Melbourne, 2015), Seoul Arts Centre (Seoul, 2014), Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (Rotterdam, 2014), CODA Museum (Apeldoorn, 2013), MoA Museum of Art Seoul National University (Seoul, 2012), Espace Louis Vuitton (Hong Kong and Singapore, 2012), Gyeonggi MoMA (Seoul, 2009) and MoCA Shanghai Museum (Shanghai, 2008). Movana has received awards such as the 2011 and 2012 Sovereign Asian Art Prize. Her art works have been collected by the Hong Kong Heritage Museum, Louis Vuitton and private collectors from Hong Kong, China and France.
2015 Hannover & Berlin • 2015 Melbourne • 2012 Sicily • 2011 Paris • 2010 Philadelphia 2010 East Lansing • 2010 Seoul • 2009 London • 2009 Milan