Peeling (2026)
Medium: Copper, fabric, archival giclée print altered by fire
Featuring in the exhibition Flora Fantastica, during the Venice Biennale, presented by Swatch
2026 06.05-26.07
Peeling was developed during Hammer Chen’s residency at the Swatch Art Peace Hotel in Shanghai. The work grows from his ongoing interest in time, memory, and the ways a city gradually becomes part of personal experience through everyday encounters.
Inspired by Shanghai’s plane trees, Chen focused on their winter transformation, when layers of bark peel away to reveal dense, scarred textures beneath. Drawn to this coexistence of aging and renewal, he photographed an entire street of plane trees along Dingxi Road and combined fragments from seven different trees into a single continuous form. Numbers carved and written into the innermost bark by those who care for the trees became traces of human presence, suggesting how places are quietly recorded, maintained, and remembered over time.
Realised through the process of intaglio printmaking, Peeling takes the form of two elongated plane trees in copper and paper. The copper tree functions as the matrix, while the burnt and eroded paper tree appears as its print. Together, they reflect the relationship between experience and memory: one retaining the trace, the other carrying it forward as something fragile, partial, and constantly shifting.