Chris Cook was born and grew up in Hong Kong. She emigrated to the UK in the early 1990s and pursued her artistic studies there. She received a 1st class Hon Degree in Fine Art from De Montfort University, Leicester, in 1998, and subsequently received her MA in Fine Arts from the Royal Academy Schools of Art in London in 2001. She also completed an MSc in Translation from Imperial College London in 2008.
Chris is currently working in Hong Kong as a practising artist and an art educator. Throughout her recent years living in Hong Kong, she has also travelled frequently throughout southeast Asia, soaking up and drawing in their cultural and aesthetic values as well as their use of colour in art, architecture and artefacts.
Chris Cook is interested in the instability of colour. She described it as a subtle shift of hues and intensity when juxtaposed with others. The cropped and repeated geometric shapes, especially triangles in various forms, are used to suggest movement as the diagonal lines lead one’s eye around and outside the paintings. Part of a shape extends right to the painting edges to suggest that it might be part of something else; another picture alongside the same series. Whilst the uncompromising triangle shapes indicate tension and movement, quiet and muted colours create balance and weight as if to anchor the shapes from floating away and thus they create a ‘quiet’ movement.
