‘Mediation’ by Celso Yok Chan @ Fernando Leite Couto Foundation

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‘Mediation’ by Celso Yok Chan @ Fernando Leite Couto Foundation

3:32 CAT | 12 Feb 2016

In file Club of Mozambique.

Mozambican artist Celso Yok Chan opened his first solo exhibition on Thursday in the Fernando Leite Couto Foundation gallery in Maputo.

Celso Yok Chan is a self-taught artist who works primarily with watercolours. His work involves sketching without removing the pen from the paper to ensure continuity of line and inspiration. Only after does the artist paint. His subjects include people and places in Maputo, New York and London.

Celso has a bachelor’s degree in finance from the University of St John’s and a masters in environmental management from the University of Maryland, and his art reflects current issues such as inequality and social change. He lives and works between Cape Town and Maputo.

For Mozambican writer Mia Couto, the exhibition reveals secrets that go beyond it. In a text in the catalogue Couto writes: “Celso Yok Chan paints like somebody praying. When his young wife Beth was sick, Celso prayed with designs and colours on themes of childhood, choosing light to ward off the shadowy presence of death.”

“In these works, what faces this funereal threat is not the sword of a warrior, but almost childish scribbles that transform death into play, a ritual that belongs more to life than to its permanent absence. The greatest value of this exhibition is the truth in that language, the courage in this meditation. It is Love.”

Open from Monday to Friday, 8am to 9pm / Fundação Fernando Leite Couto, Av. Kim Il Sung, nº 961, Maputo / Phone: +258 21 486 957

Source: Rádio Mozambique / Fundação Fernando Leite Couto Facebook.