Chan Ting

Early Life and Practice Development

Chan Ting was born in Hong Kong in 1993 and works across sculpture, installation, image-making and sound. Drawing on her background as a hypnotherapist and sound healer, she approaches materials and objects with an acute sensitivity to their embedded narratives and temporal weight. She is based in Lam Tsuen, where she operates her studio within a historic post-war structure, integrating found materials from her immediate surroundings into her artistic practice.

Chan’s methodology is rooted in a philosophy of conservation—she salvages objects from markets, abandoned buildings, and domestic discards, treating each piece as a recipient of renewed attention and value. Her encounter with objects is intuitive and almost ritualistic. She describes this process as a form of communication: objects ‘speak’ to her, initiating a conversation that shapes the artwork’s eventual form. This tactile, dialogic approach reveals her understanding of artmaking as relational practice that honours the histories embedded in forgotten things.

Chan Ting Artworks

Chan Ting’s sculptures transform found objects through material intervention, employing industrial-grade colour pigment, construction plaster and hand-working techniques to create works that oscillate between repair, excavation and transfiguration. Her recent practice is marked by a signature palette of green—a colour drawn from Hong Kong’s historical and contemporary landscape—which she applies in layers across weathered furniture, discarded ceramics and architectural fragments. This green references both the military paint used in Hong Kong during World War II and the moss that grows across the city’s neglected spaces, collapsing distinctions between decay and renewal, violence and healing.

Found Objects and Layered Intervention

Chan’s early explorations of object-making centred on appropriating discarded items from Hong Kong’s urban fabric. In works such as those from the Abandoned Abundance series, the artist sources secondhand furniture and domestic objects from street markets and domestic residences, subjecting them to material transformation. She describes her approach as rooted in what she terms ‘queer materials’—materials conventionally associated with masculine labour, construction and utility that she reimagines through alternative, unexpected aesthetic possibilities. By engaging tools and pigments traditionally belonging to builders and construction workers, Chan locates her practice within a queer gesture of material repurposing.

Her technical process involves multiple interventions: filling cracks and gaps with industrial plaster and pigment, polishing and sanding the surface, then drilling through accumulated layers to reveal concealed histories. Each object becomes a palimpsest of intervention and care, with the artist’s labour visible in the tactile variations of surface texture—sometimes harsh and coarse, occasionally soft and reflective, often creating ambiguity about whether the work appears finished or perpetually in process.

Moss Wonders and the Residency Aesthetic

In 2023–24, Chan undertook a three-month residency at Para Site, Hong Kong, resulting in the major solo exhibition Moss Wonders (27 January–8 February 2024), curated by Jessie Kwok. The exhibition emerged from intensive research in Quarry Bay, the neighbourhood surrounding Para Site, where Chan scavenged for abandoned furniture, ceramic fragments and domestic ephemera spanning decades. She transformed Para Site’s tenth-floor annex into an immersive environment—a cabinet of curiosities that rejected the aesthetic conventions of the white cube.

The exhibition’s title and methodology drew inspiration from moss: an organism that establishes itself on seemingly inhospitable surfaces, generating its own microecology despite precarious conditions. This rhizomatic model shaped Chan’s spatial intervention. Rather than isolating objects on pedestals, she ‘carpeted’ the exhibition space with installations, invited viewers to open cupboards and peer into hidden compartments, and created an environment structured around accumulated texture and layered discovery. Accompanying sounds and photographic documentation gathered within the neighbourhood extended the work’s sensory register, situating the exhibition as a shared repository of collective memory.

Dreamskin and Material Alchemy

The exhibition Dreamskin (June–August 2024) at PHD Group, her primary gallery representation, further developed Chan’s investigation of found and secondhand objects. Here, she presented a landscape of secondhand furniture and abandoned artworks culled from various sources, reimagining these discards through colour, texture and spatial reconfiguration. The title Dreamskin suggests the permeable boundary between material reality and the unconscious, between the object’s documented history and its lived, felt presence.

The works in this exhibition consolidate Chan’s vocabulary of care and transformation—what emerges is not a return to originality, but rather an acknowledgement of the object’s capacity for continual becoming. The artist’s interventions manifest not as erasure but as addition, layering new material onto existing forms, so that temporality becomes readable across the work’s surface.

Contemporary Practices and Institutional Recognition

Chan has also engaged institutional critique and systems of value through her participation in group exhibitions examining capitalism and commodification. In Commodity-Fetishism (2024) at Square Street Gallery, she presented works examining abstraction and exchange value, positioning her object-focused practice within broader conversations about labour, consumption and alienation in post-industrial societies.

Her work is held in public and private collections internationally, with exhibitions and presentations throughout Hong Kong, Canada, China, France, Singapore, Sweden and Switzerland. Recent curatorial recognition includes her selection for Ocula Magazine’s ’New Rules: The Artists to Watch for 2026’, positioning her among emerging voices reshaping contemporary art discourse in Asia.

Select Solo Exhibitions

• Mothering, PHD Group, Hong Kong (2025–2026)
• Dreamskin, PHD Group, Hong Kong (2024)
• Moss Wonders, Para Site, Hong Kong (2023–2024)

Select Group Exhibitions

• Commodity-Fetishism, Square Street Gallery, Hong Kong (2024)
• Tendering, PHD Group, Hong Kong (2023–2024)

Statement and Artistic Philosophy

Chan has described her practice as emerging from a philosophy of compassion and openness toward discarded things. She articulates the relationship between life and art as inseparable, emphasising that her creative work prioritises human experience and the quotidian realities of those navigating Hong Kong’s conditions. Rather than pursuing technical perfection or material ‘correctness,’ she values the connective potential of art-making—the ways objects and artworks can become vessels for shared memory and collective resilience.

Her background in hypnotherapy and sound healing informs her attentiveness to the subconscious and somatic dimensions of aesthetic encounter. The artist describes seeking to offer audiences alternative perspectives on trauma, abandonment and historical transition—presenting not a singular interpretation but rather invitations to engage with complexity, ambiguity and the beauty that emerges through genuine encounters with overlooked things.

The use of green across her recent oeuvre exemplifies this philosophy. Green, Chan explains, simultaneously references Hong Kong’s violent colonial history (military paint, institutional control) and its resilient present (moss, botanical persistence). This duality—the capacity for the same symbol to represent both harm and healing—becomes central to her artistic vision. In her words, ‘When we dive into our history, green may have been used in the killing of people, but when we look at moss, the colour may represent healing. The duality is so amazing to me.’

Chan Ting’s Studio Practice

Chan operates from her studio in rural Lam Tsuen, where the physical environment—a post-war building overtaken by vegetation—becomes integral to her practice. The studio functions as both workspace and research site, where she encounters new materials through daily proximity and environmental observation. Her practice integrates rigorous technical engagement with intuitive, almost meditative approaches to material transformation, refusing rigid methodologies in favour of responsiveness to each object’s particular history.

She works with industrial-grade pigments, construction-grade plaster, found tools and hand-labour techniques that acknowledge the embodied effort required to transform materials. This labour-intensive practice contrasts with the apparent minimalism of her intervention: she does not significantly alter an object’s fundamental form, but rather works with its existing geometry, deepening texture, revealing strata and creating new surfaces that acknowledge both what the object was and what it might become.

Publications and Further Reading

Chan Ting’s practice has received attention in major publications addressing contemporary art in Asia-Pacific. Her work was featured in Artasiapacific magazine’s ‘New Currents’ series, and she participated in a studio interview with Vogue Hong Kong (August 2024) discussing her approach to found materials, queer aesthetics and the role of intuition in her artistic process. Her selection for Ocula Magazine’s ‘Artists to Watch for 2026’ reflects growing international recognition of her contributions to contemporary sculpture and installation practices.

You can follow Chan Ting on Ocula to learn more about her work, discover upcoming exhibitions, and learn about art for sale.

Website and Instagram

Chan Ting’s website can be found at chan-ting.com. You can follow her on Instagram at @ctsimage.

Chan Ting FAQs

Ocula | 2026