Rowan Chanen

With a keen eye for authenticity, enigma and everyday human drama, Rowan’s unique visual style provokes fundamental questions about how we interact with ourselves, with each other and with the world around us.

His primary photographic interest lies in exploring the unseen forces that compete and conspire to obscure truth and conceal reality. Sometimes they hide in plain sight; sometimes they lie deeper within. In seeking to reveal them, the camera compels us to find new meaning and understanding in what we might otherwise take for granted.

In July 2019, Rowan held his first solo exhibition in Melbourne, Australia, featuring black and white 35mm film portraits photographed in Tibet in 1998.

In November 2019, Rowan was the sole participating photographer at Artisan Singapore, an exhibition exploring the connections between art and fashion.

In 2021 he participated in Artisan's virtual exhibition "Unseen: A Precursor" and in 2022 was a contributor to the Of Limits Collective “A Thousand Words: Photography in Context" which examined the nexus between photography and literature.

In 2023, Rowan was invited by the Cultural Affairs Bureau of Tainan to become the first photographer in residence at the Nanning Literary House. He will shortly be publishing two books of collected photographs taken during his month long stay there.

This year he is part of the continuing international exhibition "Imperfect Travel: Life in a Post-Covid World” now showing at the Yeh Shyr Tau Memorial Museum in Tainan, Taiwan until November 2024.

Rowan continues to explore, document and live in some of the more intriguing corners of the world. Australian-born, he is currently residing in Singapore.