‘The atmosphere is so tense in Hong Kong now,’ says artist Movana Chen
- The inspiration for Chen’s first art project came to her while shredding documents for her parents’ failed business
- She takes magazines, books and maps, shreds them and creates knitted artworks from the remains
Paper shredder: I was born in Chaozhou, Guangdong, in 1974. My home village was a six-hour drive from Shenzhen. We lived in a traditional village house with my grandparents. I am the eldest of six girls and one boy and I helped look after my younger siblings.
My mum was a housewife, my father a businessman. He had a bicycle and would travel from village to village selling fish – I think that’s where my love of fish comes from. I went to school when I was about eight, quite late. For part of my school education we were in Hong Kong and then Singapore. I liked creating clothes for my Barbie doll so, along with my sister, I went to the London College of Fashion to study. I left after two years. My sister now works in the fashion industry.
My parents had a mainland business and I did their accounting for seven years. Then with Sars in 2003 the business finished and I remember shredding some papers and observing the colour of the highlighter pens on the shredded paper, which inspired my first art project.
One for the books: I had always enjoyed art but initially it was painting. I went on to study for a degree in fine art (at the RMIT University in Hong Kong) in 2003. After I studied in London, I brought my books and magazines back from the course. One of the magazines I transformed into the first wearable piece, so that’s my first fine arts project – that one is still here in my studio in Chai Wan. Sixty pages is one dress and equal to my height, 150cm.
At first I used magazines (shredding them to create art: clothing, containers and structures), but in 2009 I did a lot of travelling and I loved reading. A friend gave me a book that was meaningful to them, the love story One Day in Korean – it was made into a movie.
I studied Korean so I could read a little of the language. I also went to Tel Aviv and I tried to learn Hebrew. And I looked at the Dongba language in Lijiang (in China’s Yunnan province), and I learned how people used to communicate. They drew a flower, a tree or a house. It’s about how you read and understand a person – what they want to share with you when you can’t understand their language.
Lost in Siberia: In 2016, I was invited to Krasnoyarsk, in Siberia, for a book fair. Most people were flying direct, but I flew to Moscow and then took a 68-hour train ride. A man helped me at Moscow station. Then an old lady sat next to me and gave me kimchi.
The next day Russian soldiers came into the cabin. I was continuing to knit my piece Travelling into your Bookshelf, which is now 20 metres by 0.4 metres and weighs about 10kg. The soldiers joined me. It was like a piece of theatre: knitting, eating, chatting. They drew in my notebook. Later I got lost in the Siberian forest. I like going on adventures by myself. I like maps, but I don’t have a good sense of direction.
Postcards from Chai Wan: I have social media, I have Instagram, but the communication is not as real as handwriting letters and using stamps. I want proper stamps, not digital ones. When I headed back to Hong Kong in March after travelling to Japan, Portugal and London, leaving Europe in lockdown felt surreal.
On returning I wrote 100 postcards to 100 friends. Some of them haven’t arrived yet. But it is a personal message. At Hong Kong airport I enjoy visiting my diary (written from 1989 to 2011) woven into a sculpture. It’s in the Cathay Pacific lounge. I also have commissioned works at Louis Vuitton in Paris and at Chat (Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile) in Hong Kong.
Many new friends invited me to dinner with their families. My materials are all around the world, you are collecting from people and you keep moving. While in California, I hiked in the Joshua Tree National Park with friends. We took my 10kg artwork and they wrapped it around me and I became part of the rocks.
A heavy load: For my solo exhibition, I’m in Flowers Gallery, in Sheung Wan, quite often. There’s my “Body Container” series that I began in 2005, and Travelling into your Bookshelf, which keeps on growing. I use shredded magazines, maps and books, and those thoughts, emotions, writing and symbols are reworked into my sculptures – KNITerature – and my acrylic work How Are You?, which explores how we are coping with the coronavirus.
The name of the exhibition is a symbol inspired by the Dongba language of the Naxi people in southern China. A few weeks ago, I performed wearing my Body Container and stood at a set of traffic lights in Central for half an hour. The atmosphere is so tense in Hong Kong now. I could see how other people saw me. A bus driver would take a photo, another driver a video. Some people had their heads down in their phones and just walked by without seeing me. Hong Kong is a busy place.
I used to walk around in it, but this Body Container has become bigger, as I’ve shredded maps from my travels to Sicily, the Lake District (in England), Siberia, so now I just stand as it’s too heavy. I also have a new piece – Words of Heartbeats – knitted with maps and dictionaries. You can feel the person, the writing, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese. You create something new, a new language.
Weaving stories:I’m not a good knitter, I’m an artist. It’s the journey, the book itself, the moment, the place, the person – that’s the magical key you turn and go into the house. Sometimes I stay in a hotel but mostly I stay at friends’ homes. All my friends, they don’t know one another but around the world they are connecting through the knitting.
Over two years, people sent me books, I read them first and then shredded them. I sent them back and they knitted their book and these pieces are connecting culture, wherever they are, in Travelling into your Bookshelf. One new friend in Tel Aviv gave me a book where, as a child, she had drawn a story about her grandmother. I have it here. I was very emotional, she was crying. How someone can understand you in 10 minutes. Some people say, “Oh no! You destroy books!” But while I’m weaving all those beautiful words, symbols and communication are being woven into a new artwork.
Movana Chen’s exhibition is showing at Flowers Gallery, 49 Tung Street, Sheung Wan, until November 7.
