Sidi Chen

2023 SIMILKAMEEN ARTIST RESIDENCY AWARD RECIPIENT

Image: Sidi Chen on the Yukon River at the Canadian Wilderness Artist Residency

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 Emily Carr University of Art + Design with Master of Fine Arts in 2023. 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.

Instagram: @sherlchen | Website: sidichen.com