On View: March 28 – May 9, 2025
Virtual Artist Talk: Monday, April 1 at 4:15 PM

Gaye Chan is a conceptual artist who moves between solo and collaborative activities that take place on the web, in publications, streets as well as galleries. Her recent work often ruminates on how cartography and photography simultaneously offer and occlude information. Past exhibition venues include Art in General (New York City), Articule (Montreal), Artspeak (Vancouver), Asia Society (New York City), Gallery 4A (Sydney), Honolulu Museum of Art (Honolulu), SF Camerawork (San Francisco), Southern Exposure (San Francisco), and YYZ Artist Outlet (Toronto).

Chan’s collaborative projects include being a part of Eating in Public, an anti-capitalism project nudging a little space outside of the commodity system. Following the path of pirates and nomads, hunters and gathers, diggers and levelers, they gather at people’s homes, plant free food gardens on private and public land, set up free stores, all without permission. 

Gaye Chan was born in Hong Kong and immigrated to the United States in 1969. She received her MFA from San Francisco Art Institute and is a professor of the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa.

Chan’s work has been supported by Art Matters and the Creative Capital Foundation.

Artist Statement

This exhibition is a durational project Gaye Chan began in 2012 that stemmed from a chance encounter at a produce distribution company. Intending to get a case of overripe tomatoes to make sauce, she noticed heaps of baling straps. As commodities move across the globe, baling straps like these are found binding box to box, paper to paper, and everything to pallets. Used once and discarded into the waste stream. Unable to simply walk away, Chan gave herself the task of figuring out how to reuse them. After watching countless youtube videos on basket making methods from around the world, she managed to develop a basic weaving technique. Eleven years and over a thousand baskets later, she continues to extend the life of this ‘waste’ material through making and skill-sharing in a variety of tactics.

In addition to making DIY instructions available, periodic in-person ‘trainings,’ all straps will be distributed at the close of this exhibition.