Ivy MA, King Chu is a Hong Kong-based artist working in drawing, painting, photography and installation art.

She received her MA Degree of Feminist Theory and Practice in Visual Art from the University of Leeds in the UK in 2002, and her BA of Fine Arts (Painting) from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) / The Art School, Arts Centre in 2001.

Ivy has had a number of solo exhibitions in Hong Kong. She was an Asian Cultural Council Fellow in 2007 and received the Hong Kong Contemporary Art Awards, Young Artist Award in 2012. Her works are held in the collections of the Hong Kong Museum of Art, M+ Museum in Hong Kong, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in the United States.

Bird of Shape : Big Box No.01

Between 2021 and 2025, I left Hong Kong and visited more than twenty cities across Europe, Asia, Central America and the United States. Throughout my travels, I carried a compact digital camera, capturing thousands of photographs of birds in flight. Each photograph was taken using continuous shooting mode. This required swift judgement; the moment the shutter was pressed, two distinct moments in the bird’s life were captured-a pair of frozen movements, their forms faintly revealing the process of ‘having once flown’. I arranged these pairs of consecutive photographs vertically within computer files, before printing them out. These photographs serve both as original photographic works and as direct source material for each collage. In addition to the printed photographs, I frequently used paper coated with gold pigment to introduce golden reflections into the cropped black-and-white images. For this exhibition, I have selected just one very minimalist work from a collection of eight hundred collages. I deliberately use such small collage to subject it once more to the ‘test of light’: an image file produced by an amateur scanner was enlarged and printed on professional photographic paper. This approach aims to highlight the tangible effects of the image after various digital transformations, as well as the interplay of layered paper textures; the final image, mounted on an aluminium panel, has neither a background nor a conventional frame, thereby bringing the collage’s distinctive, irregular shape into sharper relief.