Ray Chen

My work, the “Mother and Child” series, represents values instilled and influenced by notions of matrilineal family education which urges oneself to lead a purposeful and meaningful life and to defy and overcome impossible possibilities. Strengthened by women’s beliefs and a maternal drive to allow inspiration, love, and persistence to slip into our lives, it redefines and refines our individual role in society. It also demonstrates how changing circumstances and moving forward to a wider field for gender’s voice and family education within our society and around the globe, shape our social and artistic values.

The “Mother and Child” series not only challenges our understanding of contemporary, post-modernism and what is “current”, as well as, our boundaries and connections within a multi-layered and complex emerging aesthetic that stimulates and awakens our cultural consciousness to the essence of feminism within the rich history of gender roles, but also shifts our notion of modernity and aesthetic modernism toward examining its physicality. Its artistic expression interconnects process and vision, aesthetics and concept, and language of expression to the material – clay. It redefines “ceramics” and its old traditions, offering insight into contemporary, revolutionary, cultural, and progressive stages of modern and post-modern perspectives, as well as, reinforces our sense of adaptability, vital to the essence of humanity.