Asia Art Archive welcomes Chen Mo and Jane Cheung Yan Yi to Try Try Zine Residency 2025.
The two proposals were selected from a pool of tremendously enthusiastic open call responses relating to AAA Collections. This residency supports and develops zine-making activities more broadly at AAA, while encouraging artists to activate our materials. The residency culminates in a public programme held at AAA’s library. In the third edition of Try Try Zine Residency, the selected residents showcase the portable nature of zines to investigate the routes we take. Revisiting the traces of our days and ways is long.
Chen Mo’s zine residency builds on her Master of Architecture thesis, “The Life and (other) Times of the Cross-Harbour Tunnel,” which reinterprets site-specific urban infrastructure through alternative histories and non-linear narratives. Chen will explore AAA’s resources on architecture, psycho-geography, and artist cartographers, developing a zine designed to be read during transit. The zine proposes an alternative mapping of the commuting experience and acts as a vehicle to transport readers to alternative timelines beyond the confines of commuting time. Reflecting on our accustomed way of moving through the city, the zine invites a reimagination of the efficiency and linearity of commuting.
Jane Cheung Yan Yi expands on her ongoing research-based writing projects on the identities of new immigrants and female fishers in Hong Kong. Inspired by the local mythological figure Lo Ting, Jane employs an oceanic perspective to tackle Hong Kong’s identity problem. Cheung delves into AAA’s Hong Kong collections to look for cultural symbols, routes (instead of roots), and even fish. The results will be interwoven into a contemporary mythic literary zine.
Chen Mo’s practice lies at the intersection of architecture, art, and performance, exploring themes of temporality, memory, mobility, and the interplay between space and everyday life. Working across drawing, zines, printmaking, and sound, Chen’s work is rooted in peripheral experiences, exploring how spatial and sensory exchanges shape our lived experience of place and time. She navigates the gaps between dualities, seeking spaces where boundaries blur and interconnectedness emerges. Central to her process is observation—a dynamic act of noticing that opens pathways for connection, reflection, and imagination. A recent graduate of University of Hong Kong’s Master of Architecture, Chen is also a co-initiator of BarofSpace, a platform dedicated to introspections on spatial experiences, spontaneous dialogues, and everyday moments that shape our lives.
Jane Cheung Yan Yi is a writer and interdisciplinary artist. Cheung’s work examines the tensions and complexities of personal emotions within shifting cultural-political contexts. Using fabricated narrative as methodology, she ruptures lived reality to re-articulate overlooked, forgotten, or habitual moments in daily life. She was awarded Youth Literary Association’s 50th Flash Fiction Award and won HKBU Faculty of Arts and the Language Centre's 11th Intervarsity Creative Writing Competition for Prose. She is currently developing the Hong Kong Arts Development Council–funded writing project Her Glance Flickers the Sea about female fishers in Hong Kong.
