Chant Avedissian was born in 1951 in Cairo, the son of Armenian refugees who fled the Turkish incursions in 1915-16. After studying fine art at the School of Art and Design in Montreal and applied arts at the National Higher School of Decorative Arts in Paris during the 1970s, Avedissian returned to Egypt. He fused the techniques, concepts and cosmopolitan experiences acquired abroad with the heritage of his Armenian-Egyptian background to produce striking commentaries on the world around him. His artistry ranges from photography to costume and textile design to the painted stencils seen here. His relationship with Hassan Fathy, a well-known Egyptian architect who advocated the use of local materials and craftsmanship, challenged Avedissian to reconsider local traditions of artistry and to appreciate the properties of common materials.

Exhibited widely, Avedissian's artwork is held by the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution; the British Museum, London; the Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam; the National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh; and the National Gallery of Jordan.
Avedissian commingles any number of symbols and images of tradition and modernity in these works, whose meaning he seeks to augment through his modes of representation. These modes--the application of paint by stencil and by hand, and the interchangeability of the panels themselves--do indeed, as stated in a nearby wall text, undercut "Western concepts of originality and uniqueness."

". . . with age, I came to the point, where anything that is not traditional Japanese, or close to its spirit, is pure barbarism. The simplicity and minimalism of the 'way' suits my sense of beauty perfectly, . . . through this I came to appreciate more the Arab values of desert life and the nonpermanent manners of the tent dwellers, whose custom and manners in furniture (or non furniture) are so close to the Japanese."