Exhibitions –

Kai Chan: A Spider's Logic – a 35-year retrospective at the Textile Museum of Canada (Nov 7, 2010 - May 1, 2011) and the Varley Art Gallery.
Kai Chan expresses the small moments of daily life, employing materials and techniques that speak to tradition and modernity. This exhibition celebrates his achievements and reveals the essence of his observations of natural and constructed worlds – and his autobiographical impressions of the connections between the two. To view Chan's artwork is to see him as a "master of the unremarkable" – twigs, thread, toothpicks and buttons are the ephemeral materials that he employs to create transfixing "other-worlds". He works with common household "things" that are reminders of his years growing up in China. Chan has altered the gene pools of what constitutes sculpture and what constitutes textiles by manipulating and representing elements of the natural world to conjure impressions that play on natural phenomena, geographical boundaries and cultural influences.