Artist Statement

Florence Chen works with paper, one of the most familiar materials there is, to construct moments that ask for a second look.

Using paper quilling and mixed media, she creates dimensional works that start from the familiar and the overlooked: everyday subjects, small moments, and ordinary encounters. Beneath that familiarity, her work explores tensions that do not resolve into a single meaning. Structure can hold softness. Absence can reveal presence. Individuality and conformity can coexist. Pleasure can carry consequence. Rather than seeking a single interpretation, Chen allows multiple truths to occupy the same moment.

The questions she asks also shape how each work is built. Drawing on her background in engineering, Chen combines CAD modeling and 3D printing with traditional paper quilling to create custom structural forms that become integral to the finished work. Delicate strips become structures; individual elements accumulate into larger systems; fragility and strength depend on one another. The act of making reflects the coexistence Chen asks viewers to consider.

Her work explores the gap between a first glance and what reveals itself when you stay longer, when something familiar becomes layered, complicated, and less certain than it first appeared.

It rewards slow looking.

She writes more about this in a short note, Looking and Reflecting. →