Karen Chan

Lives and works in New York, NY, USA

Artist statement

Through my work, I explore ways of expressing complex and everyday emotions that are often difficult to define with the tools or languages available to us. In my experimenting and reworking of familiar materials with the obscure, I invent new ways of articulating what we experience as fear, longing, and grief—laying bare vulnerabilities and desires in their most raw forms. In the process, I also learn the language of materials, stretching their potential to tell stories other than the ones given to them. As an interdisciplinary artist, there is a dialogue that happens between the mediums I work in, where one might inform the other, sometimes coming together as a continuous gesture. I mix media and methods such as projecting film and video with field recordings, building assemblages with found objects, constructing distinctive environments with light, and writing experimental poetry. I create various opportunities for meditation on hard-to-grasp feelings and moments of uncertainty. In 2019, I devoted much of my time developing my first chapbook, Your Body Is an Idea, self-published in August 2020. In this collection, the poems speak of longing, limbo, and visions of paradise—themes that are especially significant to me now. I am also Co-founder and Co-editor of Caddisfly Project, an arts initiative based in Brooklyn, NY, that also publishes an arts magazine. The second volume, Pressure, launched in Winter 2021, examines how making art has been impacted by confinement and...

Artwork