9 May – 22 May 2006
Wai Yan’s work is developed as a framework through which he explores emotional or intellectual processes, challenging and critiquing his own subconscious. Issues that crop up again and again are the degrees of predetermination and accident. Wai Yan works predominantly in lens-based media, and there is a distinct emphasis on performance.
For his Whisper residency, Wai Yan will commence a new work in which he is both the subject and the object of the work, offering confusion between signifier, signified and sign, between the image, medium and spectator.
Biography
Born in Hong Kong at the end of the 1970s, Wai Yan Chan emigrated to the UK in 1987 at the behest of his family, ostensibly to escape the approaching communist re-appropriation of the colony (paranoia). His formative years were spent on the Isle of Thanet, and the experience of living as a teenager in Margate has cast a long shadow over his subsequent life. Specializing in art and design from an early age, Wai Yan attained distinctions at GNVQ level, a first class honours degree in Fine Art from the University of Sussex, and both a Postgraduate Diploma and MA from Chelsea College of Art. Working primarily with video, still photography and performance, he has lectured at Croydon College and was part of the team curating the Crossover Watershed II Festival in East London, 2004 and lists Russian history, British low culture and Hollywood melodramas of the 1930s and 40s amongst his interests.
