Hammer Chen is a multi-disciplinary printmaking artist. After graduating from the University of Arts London in 2016, she got RE Gwen May Recent Graduate Award from Royal Society of Painter- Printmaker. In 2017, after she returned to China, she founded her own printmaking studio in Shanghai, Wait and Roll printmaking studio which provides workshops and open space for artists. And she has been promoting new concepts in printmaking practice ever since.
Her work is informed by the idea of memory, nostalgia, and the sense of the cinematic.
Her images are not from a lived reality, they are imagined memories, rebuilt from collective experiences. She starts from a photographic archive or subjects her repeatedly drawn to —the light in the dark, the potential interaction of characters. It’s like a scene from a stage set, a kind of connected disconnection. The setting is open to interpretation, there is a tension or expectation, the anticipation of what is about to happen.