“The aesthetics are intended to seduce. I want to transport the viewer to an elsewhere, one step removed from real life….”
Suki Chan is a moving image and installation artist. Using meticulously crafted processes and by abstracting familiar materials and objects, Chan creates uncanny narratives that probe the boundaries between private and public space.
Chan's films are notable for their dream-like aesthetic. Shifting between the micro and the macro, she draws the viewer into a cinematic 'elsewhere'. Sleep Walk Sleep Talk is a two-screen installation piece, an impressionistic study of contemporary London at night that probes the delicate balance of freedoms and restrictions in an urban metropolis.
Chan’s haunting film Interval II resonates with ideas about migration and transition and how space becomes place. Threaded through her work is an elegiac tracking of the footprints of human narrative, the fables and relics embedded in time and place.
Her recent work Book Shelf, is a series of installations: Chan cuts and splices books and then forms them into constructions with mirrors and lights. They have echoes of architectural forms while also playng with illusion and our expectations regarding books and knowledge.
6805 miles is an installation of texts and photographs that document Chan's train journey from London to Beijing. The work probes cultural identity, borders, geography, encounters, nationality and language. These themes are expanded in the film project she is currently working on, Still Point, a multi-screen moving image work that explores the delicate, contentious subject of sacred places and sites of pilgrimage.
Suki Chan was born in Hong Kong and lives and works in London. She graduated from Goldsmiths in 1999 and completed an MA in Fine Art at Chelsea School of Art in 2008. Her film Interval II was commissioned by the Chinese Arts Centre, supported by Film London. Sleep Walk Sleep Talk was commissioned by Film & Video Umbrella and has been shown at A Foundation, 192 Gallery, the Concrete & Glass Festival, the New Art Exchange in Nottingham and earlier this year was screened at MoCA, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Hiroshima, Japan. She is currently working on two commisions, one for Aspex and one for the Museum of London.
In 2010, Suki Chan curated For The Sake of the Image, a moving image show for the Jerwood Space in London, which looked at the reciprocal relationship between image and sound.
Her work is in the David Roberts Collection and the Ingram Collection.
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