UNESCO: Italy in the Spotlight

Leelee Chan’s Journey Through Italy

By Maya Plentz

Sep 29 · 6 min read

The UN Brief interviewed Leelee Chan, a Hong Kong-based artist who is participating on a travelogue throughout Europe’s UNESCO World Heritage Sites, an initiative sponsored by BMW in partnership with Art Basel.

As the 2020 winner of BMW Art Journeys, she will travel through Italy, Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and Great Britain, examining material culture from the past, to discover the “places where the materials come from, the people, and the local community around them. Being a sculptor in Hong Kong, where most factories have moved to mainland China, we tend to be very detached from how things are made and from where they originate. It may seem a simple idea, but that was precisely the point: I wanted to focus on a simple concept, but immerse myself deeply into the research”.

She will visit Italy’s UNESCO World Heritage Sites, focusing on its Christian and Roman mosaics. Art Basel and BMW Art Journeys will docume…