Vogue Hong Kong: Where did you find inspiration for the artworks you will exhibit at Art Basel Hong Kong?

Zhang Yanzi: Inspiration is always quiet, surreptitious, and even enigmatic.I was trapped in New York when Covid-19 struck. In February, there were no masks to be bought anywhere in New York. So, I bought a sewing machine and some white cotton, and started to make my own.

The outbreak unexpectedly brought other existing but hidden problems to light. In the past, Chinese people have faced insults and harassment while wearing masks. The mask has a layered history of identity and division.

Each day, I used the mask surface to record moods, impressions and developments. I began on January 23rd, completing one a day until May 4th. A total of 111 were created. The Mask Diary began as a practical exercise, made of necessity, and evolved into an artwork.

There is no doubt that this outbreak has changed our way of life and highlighted unexplored social problems. Wearing a mask and sunglasses when I go to the supermarket, it may be that the mask is not only protecting me from the coronavirus, but also blocking threats of different kinds. I realised that the safety we need is not only physical, but also spiritual.

 Vogue Hong Kong:  With art being a form of communication, could you share what you want visitors to take away from your artwork?

Zhang Yanzi: This piece has been exhibited in New York and many people have said positive things. Their reasons for liking the work will vary. After an artwork has been born, it lives its own life, independent of my motivations or interpretation. When I created this work, I gave it thought and expression, and all my energy. Now it’s alone, and will have its own journey to make. How visitors understand and respond to it will depend on their own preoccupations, experiences and feelings… But I’m sure anyone who sees this work will think of 2020.

Vogue Hong Kong: What does artistic creation mean to you in this difficult time/new normal?

Zhang Yanzi: Difficulties, disasters, dilemmas… These can all be catalysts for artists.Artistic creation, for me, is to excavate the deepest depths of human desire and behaviour.

4/ Leelee Chan – Capsule Shanghai

Hong Kong artist Leelee Chan, winner of the 2020 BMW Art Journey, illustrates her experience of living in Hong Kong’s dense, urban climate. Leelee Chan’s participation in the BMW Art Journey project “Tokens from Time” was a record of her travels to Europe and her research into traditional and futuristic materials. At ABHK, she presents a new solo project Pallet in Repose (Resurfacer), consisting of four new sculptures which continue and expand the ideas and forms behind her ‘Pallet in Repose’ series, initiated during her solo show ‘Core Sample’ (2019) at Capsule Shanghai.

Vogue Hong Kong: Where do you find inspiration for the artwork you will be showing in Art Basel Hong Kong?

Leelee Chan: My works reflect my experience with the extreme urbanisation in Hong Kong. For the project at Art Basel, I have expanded the ideas behind a series called “Pallet in Repose” that I started in 2019, where I use transport pallets as a main medium for my sculptures. Having grown up in an apartment overseeing a 24-hour container port in Hong Kong, I have always been fascinated by the implications that these objects have within the context of a global trading city such as Hong Kong. A couple of years ago I was passing by a tennis court in the Indian Recreation Club in Causeway Bay in Hong Kong, and I noticed some construction workers drilling into the tennis court and breaking off a huge number of enormous asphalt pieces, revealing layers of different textured substances underneath which provoked an uncanny mixture of an archaeological site and a post-apocalyptic landscape.

I collected some of the pieces, which then laid in my studio for a while until I started developing the ideas for this new group of sculptures. Both pallets and tennis courts are “surfaces” for human activities moved by specific economical needs, with a limited lifespan. By bringing these two materials together in my installation, I intend to reclaim their original significance and give them a second life. They ‘resurface’ as an integral part of the installation.

 Vogue Hong Kong:  With art being a form of communication, could you share what you want visitors to take away from your artwork?

Leelee Chan: The installation is comprised of four sculptures: a monumental cube-shaped piece made out of seven plastic pallets standing upright with which incorporates asphalt pieces collected from the tennis court site that emerge from their dense structure; and three wall sculptures directly derived from the process of making the large sculpture, but further developed into new sculptures existing on their own terms.

I hope to evoke notions of the architectural and cosmological, and the geological and mechanical. This project also gave me an opportunity to explore my sculpture with a more painterly approach. I hope to bring awareness to perception and offer an alternative way of understanding the objects in our everyday surroundings.

The visitors will walk through the installation and partake to a specific feeling I want to communicate – that of a post-apocalyptic landscape evoking the sensation of an archaeological sci-fi site, where these elements reemerge in an unexpected form that generates a new living entity driven by its own internal logic — poetic, elevated, idiosyncratic and universally intimate.

Vogue Hong Kong: What does creating art mean to you during this difficult time/new normal?

Leelee Chan: Throughout 2020, I was partly traveling in Europe for my BMW Art Journey. It was challenging due to travel restrictions caused by the pandemic, but the experience has been giving me so many new ideas and inspiration for my practice as a sculptor. For this new body of works presented at Art Basel Hong Kong, I have been testing new techniques that I learnt from craftspeople that I met in Italy and Germany, and I have also been integrating new materials that directly relate to my journey. On the other hand, alternating times of quarantine and city lockdowns have allowed me to spend more time than usual in Hong Kong and to focus on my studio life. Constantly being able to create art during the pandemic times has been a cure-all.

5/ Movana Chen – Flowers Gallery

Local artist Monova Chen has been weaving human sculptures from magazines, books, and other printed materials, as well as performing as a performance artist with her sculptures. Prior to becoming an artist, Monova worked as an accountant for seven years.

Vogue Hong Kong: Where do you find inspiration for the artwork you will be showing in Art Basel Hong Kong?

Movana Chen: The Artwork I will be showing with Flowers Gallery in Art Basel Hong Kong is from two ongoing projects, “Words of Heartbeats” since 2019, and “Travelling into your Bookshelf” since 2009.

The inspiration comes from my travels around the world, where all the materials of books, maps and dictionaries are collected as gifts from people I meet on the road, reading and weaving people’s stories, exploring memories, and learning about cultures and languages. In the past 10 years working with my art practice, I have travelled from Hong Kong to many different cities throughout Asia, Europe, Russia, Israel and the United States and I am beginning to realise how much this crossing of borders influences my work. This cross-border communication and interaction has led me to further explore physical human relationships, dual and multi-identities, our relationship to family histories, migration and integration – how we reconstruct our culture and our identity and also learn from others who have embarked on parallel paths.

 Vogue Hong Kong:  With art being a form of communication, could you share what you want visitors to take away from your artwork?

Movana Chen: Through working with multiple participants and opening alternative forms of informal two-way communication, I believe narratives will begin to become interwoven and stories may take on new senses and characteristics. The documentations, reconstructed paper pieces and performances we will create will represent memories and dreams, ideas and wishes that are transformed into meaningful cultural dialogues. They will sit as part of an ongoing journey of weaving people’s stories and cultural narratives into wider forms of artist expression that will transcend time, place and nationality.

Vogue Hong Kong: What does creating art mean to you during this difficult time/new normal?

Movana Chen: In March 2020, I returned to Hong Kong from Europe when coronavirus began to spread throughout the world and many countries entered lockdown. Now in May 2021, still stuck in Hong Kong, in this period of surreal time, the mood in the world is out of control, the same as my material. My knitting is always damaged, but this inspired me to knit small sections at a time, to sew them all together like a patchwork of our world, knitted with maps and dictionaries.

I’ve had more time working in the studio to experiment with other materials, inspiring a new series of ink drawings on glass panels of my own Donba Symbols, which is the integral component of my art of connecting people, interweaving place, time, stories and languages.