Suki Chan

Sleep Walk, Sleep Talk

Commissioned by the Film and Video Umbrella

Saturday 24 July - Saturday 4 September 2010

Preview: Friday 23 July, 6 - 9pm

Suki Chan’s practice combines light, moving image, electronics and sound within mixed-media installations to explore our physical and psychological experience of space.

In a London of fast-blinking lights and speeding commuters, cars and trains leave luminous comet-trails marking their passage through the night, and individuals reflect on freedom in the urban metropolis, or seek escape from the repetitive habits and conditions it enforces.

Chan’s work is inspired by ideas of freedom of expression. In an impressionistic and lyrical study of London’s diverse population, Sleep Walk, Sleep Talk contrasts the movements of people on their way to and from work with their individual efforts to enjoy free time, and to create their own personal and psychological space outside the architectural restrictions and behavioural patterns imposed by life in the city.

Here she weaves together a series of video portraits highlighting revealing responses to the mania of London life. Groups of skaters, unimpeded by traffic, move freely and intuitively, mapping the twilight city. Nigerian security guards gatekeeping a deserted high-rise office block compare the ‘freedom’ of London with the rhythms and aspirations of their former lives.

Suki uses simple, repetitive and sometimes painstaking processes, abstracting familiar materials and objects, creating imaginary and uncanny narratives. Chan explores boundaries between private and public space and the relationship between an individual to the collective. A grain of rice, a house and bird are recurring motifs and subject matter in the work. Working with a spectrum of scale, from micro to macro, Chan’s enchanting and disorientating installations are loaded with symbolic references to time and place, questioning the nature of our inhabitation in the world.

Suki Chan was born in Hong Kong and lives and works in London. Chan graduated from Goldsmiths in 1999 and completed an MA in Fine Art at Chelsea School of Art in 2008. Her recent solo shows include Sleep Walk Sleep Talk, a major video installation commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella, and Interval II, commissioned by the Chinese Arts Centre, supported by Film London.

Chan has been included in several group shows in the UK, including Futuremap, David Roberts Art Foundation, London and Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art. She has also shown work internationally in Spain, USA, Singapore and China.

In 2009, Chan was selected as one of six young British artists by Charles Saatchi to take part in the BBC’s School of Saatchi. Most recently, she curated a moving image show for the Jerwood Space in 2010.

Chan’s work is included in public and private collections including David Roberts Art Foundation, the Ingram Collection, London and The Celebrity Art Collection on The Solstice.

Commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella and originally presented in collaboration with A Foundation and 198 Contemporary Arts & Learning. Funded, as part of ‘Free to Air’, by London Councils. Suki Chan is represented by Tintype.