Chan Ting
Bio +
Chan Ting (b. 1993) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Hong Kong. Her work features secondhand objects sourced from marketplaces or domestic residences. After collecting these objects and their personal stories, she transforms them in her studio through a meditative practice of painting, sanding, polishing, and varnishing. In exploring the lost functions of these objects, often abandoned or displaced by previous owners, she examines hyper-capitalist attachments to fixed value and use, and the paradox of an ever-accumulating world that still feels empty.
Through “painting” these objects with green industrial pigment, a material typically found in hardware stores in Hong Kong, Chan Ting highlights reinvention and reclamation. Once varnished, the lustrous green skin also evokes moss, an ancient organism that subverts conventional ideas of growth and reproduction. Unlike flowering plants, moss thrives without seeds or roots, propagating asexually and adapting to marginal environments in an embodiment of resilience and queer ways of being.
Chan Ting holds an MFA in Fine Arts from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She has exhibited works in Tai Kwun Contemporary, Para Site, and HART Haus, among other venues, and participated in a residency at Foo Tak building from 2019 to 2022, during which she co-founded the nonprofit project Negative Space. She was one of the grantees of the NoExit Grant for Unpaid Artistic Labour organized by Para Site and was the resident artist at Para Site’s 10/F space in 2023.
