Mohan Chen
For Mohan Chen, photography begins with movement. Travel is not an act of leaving but a quiet form of listening — a way of sensing the world through distance, light, and the subtle vibrations that exist between people and place. Working with 35mm film, he embraces imperfection as a form of truth: burn marks, double exposures, and trembling long-exposure lines become fragments of emotion, traces of time that resist erasure.
Raised in southern China, educated in Taiwan, and later trained in Spatial Performance & Design at the Architectural Association in London, Chen carries the sensibility of someone who has always lived between cultures. This background shapes a photographic language that feels both intimate and observational. His images often resemble pages torn from a personal travel diary — shaped by natural light, quiet solitude, and the architectural precision of his training. Through a gaze that is at once detached and deeply tender, he reveals the fragile beauty embedded in ordinary, passing moments.
Constellation Drift—Brighton×Amsterdam
Nikon F, Kodak Ultramax 400
2025.10.20
Medium: 35mm Film Photography / Double Exposure
Size: 30 × 45 cm（gallery-standard print sizes）
“Constellation Drift” constructs a dreamlike corridor where everyday life slips into a quiet state of celestial drift.
Shot in Brighton, the image merges two distinct realities: the seaside arcade at sunset and a calmer architectural space, overlaid with drifting foliage. Through double exposure, the frame becomes a soft collision of geometry and atmosphere—columns dissolving into rooftops, neon signage sinking into reflected leaves, and a lone figure suspended between two dimensions.
The central figure, absorbed in his phone, becomes an anchor in this shifting constellation of spaces. His stillness contrasts with the layered motion around him, suggesting a moment of pause within an overstimulated world. The double exposure blurs boundaries between interior and exterior, day and memory, creating a visual
Threshold in Between — Amsterdam × Brighton
Medium: 35mm Film Photography / Double Exposure
Size: 30 × 45 cm （gallery-standard print sizes）
Nikon F, Kodak Ultramax 400, 2025.10.20
Threshold in Between — Amsterdam × Brighton explores the fragile boundary between interior and exterior, perception and projection, the lived and the imagined.
The work overlays a shopfront threshold with an open street scene, merging two distant cities—Amsterdam and Brighton—into a single visual membrane. In the double exposure, the glass façade becomes both a barrier and a conduit: a surface that reflects, absorbs, and reorders reality. Elements of signage, awnings, columns, and urban textures fold together, forming a liminal architecture suspended between two geographic contexts. Figures appear not as subjects but as transient presences—travellers paused momentarily on the edge of two worlds.
The photograph captures the moment just before crossing a threshold, where perception is heightened and space becomes a negotiation between what is inside, what is outside, and what is imagined in between. The work engages with questions central to spatial psychology and urban experience:
Where does a city begin—at the entrance of a shop, the edge of a shadow, the surface of a reflection? And how does memory shape the architecture of these seemingly ordinary boundaries?
The double exposure fractures linear space, allowing the two cities to coexist as overlapping impressions—neither fully present, yet both insistently real. Kodak Ultramax’s warm grain diffuses the scene into something almost dreamlike, as if the viewer is encountering a city remembered rather than photographed. This image stands as a poetic meditation on liminality, inviting the viewer to inhabit the “in-between”— the threshold where spaces meet, identities blur, and the world briefly rearranges itself into a quiet, impossible harmony.
Mirage – Brighton
Nikon F, Kodak Ultramax 400, 2025.10.20
Medium: 35mm Film Photography / Double Exposure
Size: 30 × 45 cm (exhibition standard)
Mirage – Brighton constructs a liminal space where memory and reality gently dissolve into one another. Using double exposure, three separate scenes—Brighton’s shoreline, passing strangers, and a canopy of sunlit leaves—merge into a single drifting moment. A soft upper layer of reflections and shadows hovers like light leaking from another time, while bright green leaves cut sharply through the haze, grounding the image in fleeting clarity. The shoreline remains the most anchored element: two figures standing in an ordinary moment made uncanny by the layered impressions around them.
The randomness of film—the grain, color shifts, and chemical unpredictability—intensifies this dreamlike recollection, as though the frame itself is remembering. Mirage – Brighton becomes less a document of Brighton than an act of perception: a place where experience accumulates, blurs, and resurfaces, treating the world as a dream and the dream as a world.
The Sky River — Amsterdam
Medium: 35mm Film Photography / Double Exposure
Print Size: Gallery Standard
Nikon F, Kodak Ultramax 400, 2025.10.20
The Sky River — Amsterdam constructs a visual space that drifts between reality and recollection. Through double exposure, fragments of Amsterdam—its canals, façades, tree shadows, and sky—collapse into one another, forming a layered landscape where time folds and unfolds simultaneously. Architectural lines intersect with foliage, and reflections merge with passing light, as if the city were pressed into a half-developed roll of memory.
The image carries the solitude of a first-person wanderer. Rather than entering the scene, the viewer peers through the artist’s gaze into a world being reorganised and rewritten. The overlapping exposures render familiar streets uncanny, while patches of overexposure become erasures—traces of moments remembered, forgotten, and remembered again. The work is less about documenting a place than questioning how experience is stored:
How do fleeting light, streets, and silhouettes accumulate within us during a journey?
In what form do they return, reshaped, when triggered by time or emotion?
The colour shift and grain of Kodak Ultramax deepen this inquiry: warm air, diffused blues, fractured greens. The image behaves like a memory dissolving and re-forming, drifting between clarity and hallucination. The Sky River — Amsterdam is ultimately a meditation on wandering, forgetting, recomposition, and self-exploration—an attempt to understand the world through imperfect fragments, allowing the remnants of a journey to speak with their own quiet truth.
More About Mohan Chen
Mohan Chen
Film Photographer / Multidisciplinary Artist
For Mohan Chen, photography begins with movement. Travel is not departure but a quiet act of listening—an attempt to feel the world through distance, through light, and through the subtle vibrations between people and places. Working with 35mm film, he treats imperfection as a form of truth: the burn marks, the double exposures, the trembling lines of long-exposure frames. Each flaw becomes a fragment of emotion, a trace of time refusing to disappear.
Mohan Chen raised in southern China, educated in Taiwan, and later trained in Spatial Performance & Design at the Architectural Association in London, Chen’s vision carries the sensibility of someone who has always lived between cultures. His photographs often resemble pages of an intimate travel diary—images shaped by natural light, quiet solitude, and the architectural precision of his background. They offer a first-person gaze that is both detached and deeply tender, revealing the fragile beauty of ordinary moments.Chen’s practice extends into video, sound, and performance. He has documented and created media work for the Borne performance festival (Shoreditch Arts Club, London / MAMO Gallery, Marseille), and his project Embrace weaves choreography, music, and film into a single emotional gesture.
His event and art documentation work includes photography for the JD × China Mobile CMLink boat event in London and for featured works during the London Design Festival.
He is currently assembling a long-term body of work drawn from three years of imperfect film negatives—images warped by chance, error, and chemical memory. These fragments will form the basis of a new series that constructs a dreamlike world of his own: a place where clarity and distortion coexist, where memory becomes landscape, and where every unfinished moment finds a quiet place to rest.