Sarah Sen, pages from a sketchbook, 2022Ebb and Flow
duo exhibition with Sarah Sen, 2021
The Waiting Room Project
Ebb and Flow is an exhibition that captures the experience of going through the motions, navigating the familiar and unknown. Aiming to find beauty in the mundane, Celine Cheung and Sarah Sen take inspiration from patterns in everyday sights — the overlooked, forgotten and empty spaces.
Featuring detailed drawings and meditative mark-making, Celine and Sarah use collage, photocopy and tracing to create layered and intricate artworks. Thinking of their art practice as an accumulation of experiences, they revisit and reconsider past works. The result is a collection of photographs, drawings and collages spanning 5 years of their friendship.
Through making art together, Celine and Sarah find ways to navigate the flow of life while combating everyday anxieties. Both of them seek to reconnect with art-making and to experience ‘flow state’, which means a state of mind where one is completely immersed in an enjoyable and nourishing activity.
Celine Cheung, patterns (left), 2022; Sarah Sen, transfer (right), 2022, Inkjet print on tracing paper; photo by The Waiting Room
Reworked Collages
Growing up, I’ve always enjoyed doodling on scrap paper. It’s much less intimidating for me to scribble on fragments than pristine, white paper. Through collaging drawn-on pieces, I wanted to revive the playfulness in drawing and to combat learnt perfectionism as an adult.
These collages are composed of drawn-on ‘scraps’ and personal ephemera including museum pamphlets, readings and scraps. It speaks to a feeling of constriction while navigating institutions as an artist. Using methods inspired by black-out poetry, fragmenting and tearing, I am interested in modes of erasure and the loss of individuality, due to isolating modern structures.
Exhibition view, photo courtesy of The Waiting Room
Travel Photographs
Celine Cheung, Annecy, France (left), 2019; Yunan, China (right), 2018. Analogue photo prints.
Celine Cheung, Hong Kong from China (left), 2019; Hallstatt, Austria (right), 2019. Analogue photo prints.
I included travel photos from my personal collection in the exhibition. While previously I never considered them to be a part of my practice, they are important vessels of memory in my life. These snapshots captured a time when I flowed freely in the world and saw sights in a new light.