“When I was a kid, my Dad brought colourful beads back from Hong Kong and I learned this trendy 3d beading technique. As an adult I started developing this technique to create monsters.”
Lydia Chan
Set designer, multidisciplinary artist and self-defined maximalist Lydia Chan, trained as an interior designer and furthered her studies in Fashion Communication and Promotion at Central St Martin. She was selected for the 2021 Design Commission at NOW Gallery.
Her installation ‘Your Ship Has Landed’, is bright bold engaging and interactive with special AR elements that aim to merge the natural world with the digital. Her inspiration comes from science, the freedom in and limitlessness of childhood imaginations and our current predisposition, a consequence of the aftermaths of a global pandemic. Chan aims to brighten up our world again in a way that meets us where we are. The isolation and distortion of our realities have made us slightly alien to nature and the outside world, as we become consumed with the computerised, electronic and digitised methods of functioning both for labour and leisure.
A lover of monsters, designer toys and cartoons she has created a frivolous world and a fantasy experience that you can opt in and out of, which she hopes will make people feel happy, excited, just like a child again.
Lydia has collaborated with digital artists Songyee Kim and Thibaut Evrard to create an AR experience, a portal between digital and physical. Install the filter, hold up your phone and you will be transported to another world: one that blends digital and physical.
“We are all a collection of cells like little dots coming together to make a whole person. We try to detach science from our daily lives – but we are bound by the properties of the physical world.”
She hopes to plant a seed of science fiction and fantasy in our subconscious opening up conversations about “reinterpreting science as fun”.
‘Your Ship Has Landed’ by Lydia Chan. Now Gallery, SE10 0SQ.
Until Mar 6 2022.
Free entry, tickets available here.
6 – 10pm. FREE.
