Artist Introduction: Michelle Chan

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Michelle Chan is a relational artist who works primarily in photography. She uses the camera and manipulated images to generate connections and conversations with people. Her works often touch upon the notion of home,belonging, human connection, bonding, and familial relationships. More specifically, they reflect the inherited familial beliefs that inform our daily gestures and rituals, and explore Chinese beliefs that have become recurrent over centuries.

 

 

She is the founder of Phoboko, a platform that brings people together through photobooks. As a community, Phoboko interrogates photography as a medium, promoting the vision of local Hong Kong artists in dialogue with other photographers in the Asia-Pacific region.

 

 

 

“A Taste of Home” (2024)

 

 

This work explores the roots of the relationship between Chan’s husband’s extended family and food by tracing the history of family recipes from their hometown in Shanwei, China. Chan adopted the aesthetics of shanshui in traditional Chinese landscape painting to stage the food ingredients as landscapes before photographing them. By examining the relationship between family recipes, identity, and place, the work reflects on the meanings of home from varying familial relationships. Accordingly, the work questions similarities between cultural translation, dietary digestion, and ever-evolving family dynamics. 

 

 

‘A Taste of Home’ (2024) extends previously completed works about our evolving relationships with food, including ‘DayDayCook’ and ‘Grandma Grandpa Cook 2’, and builds on Chan’s artistic practice of utilising photography to generate connections and conversations between people.

 

 

 

 

 

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