Movana Chen’s Knitting Conversations began as an invitation. In 2013, the artist called on participants to contribute a book that was important to them, along with the reasons why. Chen read these books herself, sharing in her collaborators’ love for them. She then used them to make strips of paper, which became the medium for a monumental cloth-like hanging installation in the Quarry Bay art space ArtisTree. The work was knit in part by those same participants, transforming these meaningful items into material for collaborative art-making.

The recent installation of Chen’s Knitting Conversations in M+’s Focus Gallery, the first time this piece has been shown in Hong Kong since its completion, raises an important question for artists working in participatory practices. How do process-based works continue to evoke the invisible components that shaped them? In Chen’s works, this immaterial element is the act of spending time with others, often strangers, who choose to share with her as they knit together. How can this experience of community art-making, of lives coalesced, continue to be expressed as an essential quality of the work long after the act?

Exhibitions fix a work in space and time—as an inanimate and immutable object. Its display is photographed and documented to inform how the work should be installed in future shows. Chen’s works, however, are made up of countless hours spent together with hundreds of individuals who, for however long or short of a time, sit, talk, and knit with her. The final objects of her exhibitions are almost by-products of her practice. Through knitting—whether it be ‘yarn’ made out of well-loved books, maps, or dictionaries—and talking, the artist brings people together in the simplest of ways. Her works thus recognise the things that bind us: shared emotions of love, grief, joy, disappointment, happiness, fear, and desire, rather than those that divide us: language, culture, religion, gender, geographies, histories, or politics.

The materials of Chen’s works often have a deep connection to the individuals that participate in them and the places that she visits. In well-worn books, she learns about the inner lives of their readers; through maps, she learns about the places that others call home, their journeys, and their longing for adventure. In her recent, more personal Love Letter series, she memorialised past emotional attachments, documented in love letters that she has received over the years, into small sculptural forms, creating intimate works that honour, yet protect the sanctity of those unions.

Chen’s way of moving through the world with an openness to others is something that is shared with her good friend Michael Wolf, a German-born artist who lived in Hong Kong for decades and was her neighbour in Chai Wan for ten years. Chen does not remember how they first met, but Wolf collected one of her knitted body containers after they became friends.

Wolf is best known for his immersive abstract photographic portraits of Hong Kong’s urban fabric. Likened to the works of Dusseldorf School artists like Candida Höfer and Andreas Gursky, his large-format Architecture of Density images alert us to the unexpected beauty that we live amidst, if only we took the time to look around us.

Wolf had a life before art-making as a photojournalist, and he made a conscious turn towards speaking directly through his images rather than mediating the ideas of others. In The Real Toy Story (2004–2018), his study of the lives of workers in five toy factories in neighbouring Guangdong province evolved into a vast project in which he examined the global trade in plastic toys. His profound study of the residents of a Shek Kip Mei housing estate on the eve of being demolished in 2006 is named 100 x 100 for the square footage of the identical flats. These portraits of ordinary lives in the privacy of their homes are made with sensitivity, respect, and humility.

How artists find their primary language is a kind of alchemy. Initially a student of fashion in Singapore and London, Chen worked in the accounts department of her family business back in Hong Kong, shredding confidential documents. When she was studying painting by night at the Hong Kong Art School with established artists Lukas Tam and Francis Yu, her teacher Stella Tang Ying Chi prompted her students to analyse themselves in any way they wanted. Chen measured herself literally using books and magazines. These became her materials, transformed through shredding to become the primary medium for her knitted works.

For Wolf, photography was always his medium, and as an avid collector, he also considered it a form of collecting. Travelling through China, he was drawn to the everyday creativity and ingenuity of the people that he encountered along the way. His series Sitting in China is a collection of portraits of people using the most quotidian and overlooked of objects: chairs. Wolf called these creatively improvised examples of seating ‘bastard chairs’ and could not resist collecting them too. Bastard chairs have a particular resonance today, sensitising us to a world in which resources are becoming increasingly scarce. The damaged and broken are not simply cast aside to be replaced by inferior new versions but refashioned as unique examples of lo-fi design.

Chen and Wolf share views of the world in which the dignity of others and of the everyday is celebrated. Each, in their own way, has found a language through which to connect with, and communicate about, the lives of others.

Wolf passed away suddenly in 2019 at the age of 64. Chen moved away from Chai Wan and has lived in Portugal since 2020. Among her most treasured possessions is one of Wolf’s bastard chairs, gifted to her on her birthday in 2017.