ELARA'S POV
Robert Chen brought seventeen photographs on a Thursday afternoon in late July.
He spread them on the large table in my office above the gallery, careful with each one, the way you handle things that belong to someone who is gone. His father's name was Henry Chen and he painted in Vancouver from the 1960s until his death in 1997, working in a tradition that sat between abstract expressionism and something more personal and harder to categorize.
The photographs showed work that stopped me.
Not immediately. I looked through the first five with professional interest and then the sixth one made me go still. A large canvas, blues and greys with something underneath that pulled the eye inward. The kind of work that asked you to stay rather than move on.
"How large is this one?"
