Asia

Leelee Chan

Blindfold Receptor (caterpillar-yellow)

2019

Blindfold Receptor (caterpillar-yellow), 2019

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Blindfold Receptor (caterpillar-yellow) by Leelee Chan is inspired by the camouflaging nature of the peppered-moth caterpillar. In 1800s Europe, during the industrial revolution, light-colored moths evolved into a darker color after trees in their habitat darkened by the polluting soot. Today, due to rapid human changes to the environment, caterpillars can adapt even before they metamorphose into moths, mimicking the colour of the branches they inhabit. Having evolved a mechanism to gain visual information about their surroundings, caterpillars can “see” with their skin and alter their colors accordingly. This complex phenomenon indicates a kind of synaesthesia in the evolution of the species, as the skin becomes at once a site of perception and transformation for tactile and visual data.

Chan’s work is a hybrid object of industrial materials that translates the mutant nature of the caterpillar. The synesthetic skin of the animal is evoked by the changing surface of a tall chain of omni-wheels; a multi-directional roller mechanism widely used in robotics, manufacturing, and logistics, to accelerate productivity and efficiency in an increasingly automated world. The artist has meticulously assembled a pattern of omni-wheels to appear as an architectural ‘skin’. The work explores the co-existence between nature and human inhabitants in post-industrial urban environments. People are encouraged to touch the caterpillar-omni-wheels and take part in this multi-directional evolution.

Working in sculpture, Leelee Chan’s visual vocabulary reflects her subjective experience of the extreme urbanization in Hong Kong by proposing a dialogue between concrete materiality, found in heavy industry, and poetics found in ceramics, and its cultural archaeology in millinery Chinese history. Chan’s training in sculpture has allowed her to have hands-on practice in the making of each of her pieces. The structural assembling and metal welding needed for the fabrication of Chan’s works is executed by the artist herself. The artist’s work engages with wider narratives linked to science fiction, global export market, the naturalization of urban landscapes, and the environmental crisis. Chan’s sculptures often recontextualise the value of dumpster detritus, household ephemera, and mundane objects that are generally considered unmemorable or unworthy of preservation. She imaginatively explores their transformative potential and reconfigures each item according to their unique quality. Chan’s sculptures evoke architecture and anthropomorphic shapes, embedded with playful and meticulous details that slowly unfold upon closer observation.

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Leelee Chan Blindfold Receptor (caterpillar-yellow)

Leelee Chan

Blindfold Receptor (caterpillar-yellow)