Remembering Mei-Ling Chen

Mei-Ling Chen was born on 28 June 1993 in Hong Kong to Wei and Li-Hua Chen. She was the middle child of three, the one her parents described as the thoughtful one — slower to speak than her siblings, quicker to notice things. She came to London in 2012 to study Graphic Design at Central Saint Martins, graduated in 2015, stayed because London felt like the right size of life, and joined the design studio Fieldwork later that year, where she spent her career making things beautiful and useful.

Outside work, Mei-Ling was a serious practitioner of Tibetan Buddhist meditation. She had attended retreats in Scotland, Nepal and Thailand, kept a daily sitting practice, and was part of a small London sangha she had found through a friend in 2018. She read widely in both English and Chinese, kept a sketchbook with obsessive consistency, and had been photographing London — particularly its quieter residential corners, the bins and railings and back-garden trees — for years, building an archive she had plans for that she would not now complete. She also made very good dumplings, a skill passed down from her maternal grandmother, and fed her friends generously.

Mei-Ling died suddenly on 15 August 2024, following a brain haemorrhage. She was 31 years old. Her parents and sister Mei-Xiu flew from Hong Kong and were with her. Her brother Wei-Jun followed two days later. She is held in the hearts of everyone who knew her, and in the particular quality of quiet attention she brought to every room she was in.