IVY CHAN | THE WORK

STATEMENT

Born in Beijing. Currently lives and works in London.

Ivy Chan’s professional practice is tightly related to her personal living experiences. This provides a specific language for her pursuit in addressing her own identity and response to society. 
For Chan, applying contemporary art to today’s society becomes not only a tool of individual expression but the specific language for artists to speak and react to the framework of civil community. Being both an artist and part of the society, Chan's work offers the viewer the opportunity to confront and experience their lives in alternative ways. 

Reconfiguration, transformation and metamorphosis:
Chan uses this to study the characteristics and cultural meanings of materials and objects.   In realising that people’s perceptions and attitudes towards materials are always restricted by their limited experiences, Chan society's current inability to recognise, classify and employ materials in ways they were once familiar with. 
In direct contrast, Chan relishes her own ability whilst looking at an object or a material, especially the quotidian ones, to allow her imagination to metamorphose the form. 
She is interested in collecting objects from daily life and uses ways of transforming characteristics to display ‘familiar objects in unfamiliar scenes’. From this, the audience ‘re-experience’ the objects and further question how they relate to space. 
It is this interesting process of imagining which continually refreshes her artistic cognitive experiences and provides new perceptions on the world surrounding her.  Materials involved in her works are all everyday objects including pencils, clocks, carpets, receipts, rice and lifebuoys.