Well Traveled

9/12/24
My parents use a scholar stone to prop open the kitchen door.

1/13/25
As a child, I looked at things trying to figure out what was Chinesey. The artificial green of a jade bracelet. Scholar stones sitting on bespoke wooden pedestals. The Oriental Trading Company catalog, a direct merchant of bulk toys, party supplies, and glow-in-the-dark novelties. I remember seeing the name and thinking, Oh, so this is what Oriental is. Orientalism is ornamental, surface-based, and portable. It has to travel well.

4/5/25
Loving something can look remarkably similar to burying it.

11/28/25
I wouldn’t know how to make art from the things you can buy at Michaels. I’m drawn to materials with scripts – textiles, domestic objects, ornamental debris, pseudo-spiritual tools, souvenirs, lucky objects. I scavenge broadly and indiscriminately. My studio is filled with shoeboxes full of pennies, backscratchers, stickers, keychains. I have ideas of how they could be used, but they are murky. In making, you have to yield to the material constraints.

Underpinning Anne Chen’s practice is an intense attention to relationships. Bringing together handmade and manufactured objects, Anne is attentive to the way things touch one another and occupy space together: Found stones fit snugly into pedestals made from the melted wax of rescued crayons. Laboriously polished Dorodango spheres combine soil collected from flowerpots with coffee grounds from studio visits. The artworks are literally well-traveled, carrying materials gathered through chance encounters and daily movement. There is a pervasive sense of the interplay between fate and happenstance draped in the pleasure of immediate, physical experience: the feel of a surface, the weight of an object, the desire to put something in your pocket and, in doing so, understand how it came to be.

Well Traveled speaks both to this strategy and to cultural assumptions that hover around Anne’s work, pointing toward ideas of identity and inheritance that resist simple or stable readings. She confronts the long history of Orientalism that has shaped how objects with Asian provenance circulate and accrue meaning within Western collections, where flattened ideas of authenticity, spirituality, rarity, and beauty are projected. At the same time, Anne investigates her own attraction to these materials and histories. The resulting work inhabits the messy territory between inheritance, desire, interiority, and self-identification.

Well Traveled is ultimately about presence: how difficult it is to maintain, how many histories can inhabit a single object, and how rewarding it is to encounter something that carries a presence beyond itself.

Anne Chen has lived in Pittsburgh since 2009 and maintains deep roots in the local arts and cultural community. She has taught and coordinated for Prototype, Assemble, BCLA, CMU’s School of Architecture, and co-founded JADED, co-producing events for the AAPI community with the Carnegie Museum of Art, Office of Public Art, OCA, SWOP, and more. She has attended residencies at Caldera Arts, Vermont Studio Center, Ox-bow, Icelandic Textile Arts Center, Serlachius Residency, Soaring Gardens Artist Retreat, ACRE Residency, Penland School of Craft, and Bunker Projects.