Siyu Chen (she/her) was born in Shanghai, China, raised in Shanghai and Singapore, currently based in New York. The difficulty in grasping the meaning of 'belonging' lies at the core of her work. Her interdisciplinary practice explores the tension between the fluidity of diasporic experiences and the hegemony of meaning, which reduces and flattens the body. Derived from personal and psychological experiences of displacement, she situated mundanity with seemingly outdated objects, memories, or dreams. Through a generative and vulnerable process using drawing, video and text, she reflects upon, unravels, and transgresses the bifurcation between the local and the foreign. 

Chen has exhibited at tutu Gallery (New York, 2024), FJORD (Philadelphia, 2024), Arts Letters and Number (Upstate New York, 2018), am art space (Shanghai, 2020), Studio Gallery (Shanghai, 2020), Bumpodo Gallery (Tokyo, 2017), and more. Her work has been collected by Awagami Paper (Tokushima, 2017). She has recently launched her first curation project “Meandering, Spiraling, Unraveling” at Accent Sisters (Jersey City, 2024). Seeing pedagogy as a form of supporting young and emerging artists, she has taught courses in drawing and digital tools at Parsons, Tongji University and Xinchejian. Currently, she serves as an Archival and Operational Assistant at Accent Sisters, a hybrid literary arts platform comprise of a speakeasy bookstore, a pedagogical space and an multimedia art space. 

Chen holds a BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and studied digital media and creative writing at The New School. She is an alumni of The Canopy Program (2024).

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