牵挂符 Amulet for an emotional baggage, 2025
牵挂符 Amulet for an emotional baggage
2025
Charcoal, Gold Leaf, Steel, Rattan, Gloss White Rimowa Luggage
55 x 39 x 23 cm
牵挂符 Amulet for an Emotional Baggage (2025) brings together materials and metaphors that recur throughout Chen’s practice—charcoal as death, metal as scars, rattan as discipline—forming an amulet that protects us from the emotional weight we carry. Conceived as a defensive object, the work considers how we armour ourselves against psychic and bodily hurt as we carry our histories across spaces and time. Yet, when this defensive apparatus begins to outweigh past wounds, it prompts a reckoning with how identities become entangled with injury, when mechanisms of healing calcify into attachments that tether us to the very pain that they were meant to release us from.
Commissioned by Singapore Art Museum Benefit Auction 2026.
