Millie Chen
- Anna Lilli Garai
- Nov 11
- 3 min read
Millie Chen is an artist based in London who works with mixed media, taking apart everyday objects and materials and rebuilding them in new ways. Her work is closely connected to lived experience, shaped by moving between China and the UK and the layers of identity that come with that. She often begins with familiar items: objects from home, pieces found on the street, or small details she observes. Chen allows the artwork to evolve through manipulating and rearranging these elements. In works like “I Tried But There’s No Door I,” repeated door handles symbolize a continuous process of effort and uncertainty.
Q: What made you start turning everyday objects into ways of telling stories?
A: I guess it aligns with the way I do collage at the very beginning of my art career, both of which are about finding everyday fragments in life, deconstructing, reconstructing, playing around with what you already have to create new plots. I always get attracted by bigger scale installations when I go to galleries, so I began to shift my way of making art from cutting papers to remaking objects. It’s also just like sometimes a philosophical thought appears when you see a plastic bag get caught on a metal fence. I’m fascinated by the potential of everyday objects and the metaphor behind the way they are involved in our lives.
Q: Having lived between China and the UK, how has that movement shaped the way you see identity?
A: It placed me in a new system where I have more than one layer of identities, and I’m perceived in a more complicated and unacquainted way. I was put under more lenses to be observed, and each lens is created with something bigger and deeper that rooted in this society for too long. So sometimes it makes you want to fight, almost resist your own identity as you gradually develop this instinctive mechanism to protect yourself. You start to alienate yourself from who you are, which requires lots of time to heal and to reunite with that part of yourself.
Q: “I Tried But There’s No Door I” feels like it sits between limitation and surrender. What drew you to that space?
A: As a young artist in the early career, it’s hard to find my place within the industry and the community, and this journey comes with a lot of self-doubt and continuous new attempts. At the same time, I sometimes find myself struggling with not being able to realize my ideas due to lack of training on certain techniques. But you see lots of artists go through this phase and a lot of them will give you advice and help, and that’s what keeps me going in front of all these difficulties. So I’d say this work accurately expresses that phase.
Q: How do you work with memories that are partly missing or uncertain?
A: I think sometimes it’s ok to mistake your memory as imagination and imagination as memory. This fascinating mixture of reality and fantasy within our brain best describes how we as human beings function, and all the memories that remain always tell you something about those that are missing. I think I try hard to remember what is left and just let the rest go.
Q: You often talk about finding meaning in the ordinary. What kind of object catches your attention most these days?
A: I’ve been attracted to the traces left behind some certain actions a lot lately. For example, the drying water stain after you wash the concrete floor, the torn tape left on your wall after you take off a print, etc. I think they tell something about time and the temporariness in a very subtle and quiet way, like a line of code.
Q: When a work starts from something personal, how do you know when to let it go into the world?
A: I remember there’s one quote from an artist that I really like, he said “wherever you go you’ll face the issues there, and wherever there are issues, there is art.” To me I’d like to talk about how the issues affect me, that is translating the shared issue in a personal way, so there’s never a “right time” for me I guess, since the line between “the personal” and “the world” doesn’t really exist in my work. I want my works to talk to the world and let even only one person know that you are not alone or weird.
