Doreen Chan

Lives and works in New York, NY, USA

Artist statement

I am a social practice and multimedia artist based in New York who focuses on how personal memory with fragmental overlooked details interact with interpersonal relationships in the cities. For my site-specific solo exhibition in 2019, Hard Cream, I rendered my own personal world as the subject. I re-imagined my major heartbreak in Hong Kong in a small apartment with my ex-boyfriend's family, which is a common phenomenon in the city. After I moved to the US, I began an on-going participatory work, HalfDream, as a response to the distances among people from the seismic political changes in Hong Kong where I grew up—as well as the COVID-19 pandemic, in 2020. HalfDream, on-going participatory project, collects dream content of people in different regions and matches common dreams to facilitate dreamers to connect based on dreams instead of societal boundaries. In HalfDream, my work shifts from a self-reflective process to deeply considered conversations among participants. With the recent near-universal experiences of separation between friends and family, I created another participatory online platform, Sipping Dreams, commissioned with Tai Kwun Contemporary, which generates drink recipes based on participants’ dream content to encourage participants to gather virtually and talk about emotions with their drinks.

Artwork