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Travelling into my bookshelf
touring art project by movana chen
(1st Stop - Hong Kong) Shin Hwa Gallery
Oct 8th - Nov 12th, 2009
Press Release
"To give you my beloved books and let you shred them into pieces, so that they can be reborn as a form of art, I feel reluctant and sad but at the same time very grateful."- Artist's friend
Thousad of years ago, people had created symbols. Followed by the creation of texts in different languages, books were developmed as an instrument to preserve all kinds of information. Our history and culture is thus carried on; it is a part of our civillization. Hence a illustration or is left black, it is one of the hundreds of pages that are bound together to become one single book. No matter the book is college textbook, a map, a fictional novel, a comic, a dictionary, or a piano music book, they are all very precious to Movana. That is why they have become the sole material for her new installation.
In her new project, she has received numbers of books from her beloved friends as the knitting material. This is different from her previous approach, in which she used to create works of art, the "body container" sculptures, by deconstructing and reconstructing shredded pieces from old magazines. magazines are often considered as a kind of quick read that are wasily disposable. Books are rather different, as they contain the owner's memories and the papers themselves retain a unique smell as time goes by. Through the knitting process, Movana has generated communication with her friends' memories. She has also injected vitality into the shredded papers, so that they have become stories of their own. The newly constructed "books" will be sewn on canvas; it is an incorporation of the old and new ways of comprehending the books.
Shin Hwa Gallery in Hong Kong is pleased to pleased to be her starting point of this unique cultural-exchange experience. Travelling into My Bookshelf will then exhibit around the world in a few years' time.
Blog "Travelling into my bookshelf" touring art project
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