JOHN BATTEN GALLERY / DECEMBER 2003 / DIANA QUAN

Diana Quan was born in Hong Kong in 1978. She studied Illustration at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, USA graduating in 2000. Since returning to Hong Kong she has been working as a freelance illustrator.

Over the past four years Diana Quan has been working on a series of small, intimate and very delicate watercolour paintings that, as the exhibition's title - 'Passing By' - suggests, visually recreate the transient moment when a person randomly meets other people or experiences a situation as they go about the city….

These brief physical and/or emotional chance meetings rely, in part, to "yuan fun" (Cantonese: literally 'fate' and 'destiny'). The 'meeting' may in fact only amount to a fleeting glance, a modest brushing of clothes, or an intangible sense of poignancy. A brief memory, however, could be retained and, later, unconsciously recalled.…or completely forgotten.

Over 50 small delicately beautiful watercolour paintings will cover the walls of the gallery in her debut exhibition, 'Passing By' - 9 December 2003 to 10 January 2004.