Hon Eui Chen

Hon Eui Chen (b. 1981, Khao-I-Dang, Thailand) received her BFA in painting from the Savannah College of Art and Design and her MFA in painting from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her work has been shown at SCAD Museum of Arts, Savannah, Georgia; Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York; Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, New York; and Dean Project, New York, among other venues. She has participated in residencies at the Bronx Museum, Jamaica Center, Vermont Studio Center, Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, and Yaddo. She currently lives and works in Queens, New York.

In Conversation with Friday Arts

Friday Arts

Tell us about your practice and process.

Hon Eui Chen

I make embroidered paintings using various types of yarns, a needle and canvas to stitch imagined landscapes. My process is quite simple and uncomplicated. Using seed stitch technique, I sew designated colored yarns into my canvas of choice. I approach embroidery as a painter, using yarns as my medium. I rely on photographs and my own memories to render scenes of real and imagined places that seem equally familiar and indeterminate.

What themes/ideas do you find yourself continuing to return to over time?

Memory, Home, Belonging, Displacement

Can you speak about how you started incorporating stitching into your paintings?

I started stitching when I started working for an interior design firm back in 2016. I have always incorporated fiber in some ways in previous works but never entirely. I was working full time, coming home exhausted and emotionally depleted. Stitching aimlessly allowed me to feel grounded and calm. A slow connection back to being an artist, a way to keep my studio practice going. Over the years, it transitioned from abstract compositions to abstracted landscapes.

How do you think about place in relation to your work?

Place is a physical and contextual environment where things happen. Physicality is essential to me. My art practice is always about to investigate a place to know more or to get to know.

How does your personal history inform your work?

By default, our own personal history will always inform our work. It is what we know and can make sense of or not make sense of. Displaced at the age of 7 from a refuge camp on the border of Thailand and Cambodia and to a small college town in Mississippi, my childhood was imbued with feelings of conflicting identities, cultures and an overwhelming sense that I did not belong. Making art was my way of coping with those feelings.

How you approach the natural world in this moment of climate disruption?

I approach the natural world as memory rather than scenery, as a moment of dialogue between the past and the present. It is a refuge from this uncertain world. The climate crisis does not factor into my work as an idea.

There’s a poem by Mark Strand, Keeping Things Whole that really resonates with me as a figure in nature.

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

Are there artists who you think your work is in conversation with?

Milton Avery, Agnes Martin, Elise Peroi, Tatiana Trouve, and Tuan Andrew Nguyen.

What are your thoughts on the role of art and artists today, at this particular moment in time?

At this particular moment in time, I think the role of art and artists is both quieter and more urgent than ever. With AI imagery and endless scrolling, we are living in a hyper-saturated visual culture.