Biography
Movana Chen’s artistic practice stems from her original technique of painstakingly knitting shredded paper into fabric. Her best known and largest ongoing series, “Body Containers” (2004-), consists of knitted paper tubes meant to be fitted over a person’s entire body, which have been displayed as installations and worn in performance pieces. Central to her practice, she says, is the attempt “to explore the various methods to ‘wear’ one’s identity.” Chen, who attended the London College of Fashion, nicknames the Containers “magazine clothes”, in part because they were made from luxury fashion publications (the more infamous pieces in the series were constructed from an issue of Vogue and a Shanghai Tang catalogue). In 2010, she created her “Art Diary” series—an autobiographical collection of wall-mounted pieces made from the books on her bookshelf.
