Curated by Maria Sprowls
Filter Photo
Chicago, IL
11.07.2025 - 12.20.2025
Moon and mother, both satellite creatures, exercise a pull toward their respective worlds. A mother’s child can become her whole world, as the force of her gravity touches and affects every single bit of the child.
The gravitational relationship between Moon and Earth parallels the dynamics of the bond between mother and offspring; it is a force that endures throughout the lifetime of both, and reverberates long after one of them is gone. Tides are determined by the Moon’s pull, as its gravity tugs at Earth, shifting its mass and distorting its shape ever so slightly. The pull is strongest on the points closest to the Moon and weakest on the points farthest away, but every single bit of water is affected.
In The Tenderness of Tides, curated by María Sprowls-Cervantes, Alison Chen explores water and its relationship to the moon’s gravitational pull—the magic of invisible forces that dictate the rhythm of the ocean. Such a relationship is perceived and manifested by Chen as both cosmic and intimate, a dance that has existed long before us, and will continue long afterwards.
This body of work began as an organic documentation of Chen's daily experiences in motherhood and greatly expanded when she found a photograph of her maternal grandmother as a new mother holding her newborn daughter. The photograph was rediscovered upon her grandmother’s death at the end of 2019. On that same trip, she heard her mother’s last words to her own mother, who lay cold on the mortician’s table. Knowing the tenuousness of their relationship and gazing upon this celebratory image taken during her traditional Chinese one-month celebration, the artist wondered: “How do we learn what mothering should look like? How does our own generational and cultural trauma factor into our ideas of what it means to care for our children?”
Like the tides, Chen frequently finds herself pulled by forces in her own motherhood journey that are invisible and lay beneath the surface—the residual and inherited trauma of generations past. The artist exists in a constant navigation between her personal beliefs, experiences, and the historical hardships of the past.
A HOLE TO THE WATER
Shortlisted Artist for the Discovery Award at Jimei X Arles International Photo Festival
Nominated by Yingying Gan and Yichen Zhou
Jimei Art Center
Xiamen, China
11.29.2024 - 1.12.2025
CURATORIAL STATEMENT
Alison Chen is an artist born in the US. S, she has been continuously exploring her emotional voyage over the past decade through photography, video and performance, capturing her experiences in romantic relationships, marriage, childbirth, and motherhood. The physical and emotional changes that women experience throughout different life stages are so subtle, and universal, and that they often overlookedunspoken, even by women themselves. These flowing shifting emotions have all been captured by Alison’s work, including every moment of ecstasy and downfall traced in her intimate relationship with her husband.
As Alison continued to explore intimacy, her perspective shifted to focus on motherhood after the birth of her two children, with “motherhood” becoming a new role in her work. During the process of raising her children, Alison also began to reevaluate rethink the influence of intergenerational relationships between herself and the women in her family. “Water” appears frequently as a metaphor in her work. As a second-generation Chinese-American, the waters represent the physical distance between her and her family's history. Alison’s connection to her family’s cultural background, experiences, and emotions feels as if she’s looking across a vast body of water, unable to fully reach the other side. Water symbolizes both the division across national borders and the biological link between generations, as a baby’s first home as an embryo is swimming in the amniotic fluid of the womb. Photography is the tool Alison uses to navigate this vast expanse of water. The archival images in her work point to past events, but through re-photographing, re-interpreting, and interacting with these images, Alison intervenes in these historical moments. The projection onto her family’s archival photographss introduces another layer of time, acting as an intervention into the past and a performative performance gesture through which the artist connects with her family histories and heals the emotional scars frozen in these images.
In her work Many Moons, Alison playfully draws lunar phases on her back marked by cupping bruises, symbolizing the monthly waiting and struggle against with infertility. Through performing in this way for the photography, she builds her own memories, opening up the heaviness of the actual emotional experience.
The title of the exhibition, A Hole to the Water, reflects a favorite game Alison and her children play at the beach. They try to dig a hole to reach the sea, but no matter how much they dig, they never quite get there. Moments later, seawater seeps in, filling the hole. The sea reaches them in its own way, just as the quiet emotions in Alison’s work reminds us of the water-like ebb and flow of our complex emotions and how they color our lives while we strive to bridge our distances and separations.
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A HOLE TO THE WATER
Shortlisted Artist for the Discovery Award at Jimei X Arles International Photo Festival
Nominated by Yingying Gan and Yichen Zhou
Jimei Art Center
Xiamen, China
11.29.2024 - 1.12.2025
Curatorial Statement
