2026 Season
Sidi Chen: Story-Lines | 线性叙事
February 28 - April 6
Opening Reception Sunday March 1, 2 -4 pm
Sidi Chen explores the relationships between bodies in various states and dimensions, including human, ecological, and planetary. Through their practice, they interrogate the principles to mediate, negotiate, and re-orient such relations through movements that inspire empathy across different bodies. To research such a multifaceted enquiry, they engage an interdisciplinary process bridging arts, natural science, and social development, as well as their own queer diaspora journey across the globe, to understand how to ground the constantly shifting identities, politics, and narratives of the diverse bodies that their practice touches. Therefore, in the exhibition, “Story-Lines | 线性叙事”, they reflect on their diasporic journey, whether it is the immigration processes or the site-specific research trips, to interrogate the linear methodologies through poetic interventions.
(Paddling down the Yukon River, YT, during the Canadian Wildness Artist Residency. photo credit: Geneviève Paré)
Artist Bio
Sidi Chen is a traveling queer artist whose practice addresses the intersectionality of the body, community space, and the land. For the creative process, Chen empathizes the body as a unit of measurement, a vessel of relationships, a repository of experience, and an instrument for creativity. Through his interdisciplinary research crossing arts to science and social movements, Chen's interested in how the embodied experience informs the relations and agencies of the bodies that are human, ecological, and planetary.
Chen graduated from the University of the Fraser Valley with BFA with the honor of distinction in 2018 and is a candidate for the Master of Fine Arts Program at Emily Carr University of Art + Design (September 2021). Chen has participated in a wide range of residencies, exhibitions, performances, and projects in North America. Sidi Chen is currently working as a practicing artist, an independent arts administrator, and a community worker in the historical Chinatown, on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) First Nations, known as Vancouver, BC.
Chen graduated from the University of the Fraser Valley with BFA with the honor of distinction in 2018 and is a candidate for the Master of Fine Arts Program at Emily Carr University of Art + Design (September 2021). Chen has participated in a wide range of residencies, exhibitions, performances, and projects in North America. Sidi Chen is currently working as a practicing artist, an independent arts administrator, and a community worker in the historical Chinatown, on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) First Nations, known as Vancouver, BC.
