Re:Color
"Do ordinary things with extraordinary love." — Mother Teresa
Even the most ordinary object may reveal something extraordinary, when looked at with a different eye and held with a little more care, a little more love.
Over the years, I have been working with discarded HDPE plastic, a material that is familiar yet easily overlooked in everyday life. Through cutting, shaping, and reassembling, I transform these neglected fragments into practical, wearable jewellery and objects.
I am fascinated by the colours already present in the material. Rather than adding colour, I work with what the plastic carries—its unexpected combinations, tones, and traces of its previous life. Each piece becomes part of an intuitive palette, allowing colour, form, and composition to playfully emerge through the making process.
Lightweight, colourful, and playful, the series creates a connection between consumption and regeneration, inviting us to reconsider how material value and beauty are shaped—and whether something needs to be precious to become precious to us.
Artist Bio:
YuChun Chen is a Taiwanese contemporary jewellery artist and curator based in Taipei. Her practice explores the relationships between objects, the body, memory, and everyday life. Working through jewellery, she is interested in how materials and objects can carry personal experiences, cultural references, and traces of time.
Born and raised in Taiwan, Chen studied contemporary jewellery at Alchimia Contemporary Jewellery School in Florence, Italy, and later received her MA in Applied Art from the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam. She has maintained an independent jewellery practice since 2001. Alongside her artistic practice, she founded MANO Gallery in Taipei and later established dodoer, a curatorial collective exploring contemporary jewellery through Taiwanese culture and everyday life.
Her experiences of living and studying in Europe have also led her to look at her own cultural background from a different perspective. She seeks to bring together the rational and the intuitive, restraint and openness, movement and stillness found across Eastern and Western cultures, translating these tensions into a language of jewellery that engages in dialogue with the body.
Her work has been exhibited internationally and is included in collections such as the Alice and Louis Koch Collection at the Swiss National Museum, the Marzee Collection, and the Grassimuseum Leipzig.
