HALEY CLOUSER
CURATOR | WRITER

Hon Eui Chen:
In a field, I am the absence


For her first solo museum exhibition, New York-based artist Hon Eui Chen (SCAD B.F.A., painting, 2004) explores ideas of home and the reverie of time in embroidered paintings, gouache drawings, and a large-scale installation of abstract landscapes. Born in a refugee camp on the Thailand-Cambodia border and raised in Mississippi, Chen uses her work to process the struggle to recall fleeting memories of her youth and feelings of displacement. Consequently, her artistic practice serves as an exercise in recovering forgotten moments, expressing her identity, and articulating her longing for home and community.

Across this new body of work, Chen relies on photographs and her own memories to render scenes of real and imagined places that seem equally familiar and indeterminate. In her embroidered works, soft-toned threads are sewn into expansive, undulating fields — often with isolated or abandoned houses in the distance — that blend into the muted colors of the linen canvas. The faintness of the compositions and their large swaths of empty space evoke clouded memories, hazy dreams, or times from long ago. With each stitch and brushstroke, Chen gives shape to a subject as formless, impermanent, and transitory as memory, while simulating a place for recollection and dreaming.
Savannah College of Art and Design 
Museum of Art 
Savannah, GA
05/17/2024 - 08/19/2024

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