Kai Chen
Kai Chen transforms scans of his mother’s clothing into a layered portrait of memory, fashion, and identity. Patterns and textures gathered from her closet are reorganized into a grid and printed across cotton, chiffon, canvas, and other fabrics. Sewn and folded into a tall accordion structure, the book shifts between textile, archive, screen, and folding closet door. As the fabrics drape, overlap, and reveal one another, the rigid geometry of the grid gives way to something more intimate and bodily. The work considers how clothing can preserve traces of personality and how fragments of material memory can become a portrait of a person without depicting them directly.