‘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.
