Text | Alice Kok
In 2021, AFA Macau curates “Femininity in Art”, the secondpart in a series of thematic exhibitions by female artists, “Structural Ambiguity" is a solo exhibition of the work of Angel Chan. “Structural Ambiguity", the title of this exhibition, refers to a part of a sentence in English that can be parsed in more than one way, resulting in uncertainty or double meanings due to the multiplicity of sentence structures, known as “Structural Ambiguity". For example: “She meets a man in high-heel shoes.” Does she meet a man in high-heel shoes? This syntactic structure produces an ambiguous meaning that is in line with Chan’s creative approach. Therefore, I have used the title “Structural Ambiguity” to look at Chan’s porcelain skeleton assembled with high-heeled shoes, and interprets it in terms of its stylistic structure and the multiple meanings it evokes.
Born in Hong Kong, Angel Chan graduated from the Macao Polytechnic Institute in 2015 with a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts, majoring in ceramics, and later graduated from the Taipei University of Education with a Master’s degree in Art and Plastic Design. Chan exhibits six sets of ceramic works, using high heels as a creative element. Angel Chan has been a fan of high heels since the early days of her career, and has previously created a series of hand-kneaded ceramic works of high heels in Macau. Later on, she abandoned the appearance of high heels and transformed them into symbols, using plaster moulds to re-mould the shapes of high heels, and then reassembled them into various shapes, including an animal trap, a cannibal flower with teeth, or different parts of the human body, including the pelvis, spine and skull.
There is a strong sense of structure in these works, with the same shape of heels being arranged in different ways to form what appears to be an autonomous form, but the independence is only an illusion; each of them is bound by an established subterfuge, the heels themselves. It is the rationality of the overall structure and the multiplicity of details that make the work so relevant, and the final trap is not just a trap, but an apparatus constructed from high heels. The expression is both fetishistic and critical.
This process demonstrates the transformation of Angel Chan in her own artistic journey. As a woman, she interrogates whether high heels are a tool of beauty or a curse. This contradiction led to initial questions, and then through her study of art and modelling, she internalised the contradictory entities that created them as part of her artistic work, and part of herself. Her traps or cannibal flowers, plate bones and spines made in the shape of high heels are so intriguing. Objects taken for granted in popular culture are released from their pain by her symbolic abstraction, but she captures their twisted core and transforms them into artworks that match their appearance.
陳安琦 Angel, Chan On Kei 