IAC Art Talks Series 2 Lecture 6 - Articulating Trajectories: Connecting with Chinese Heritage Through Drawing & Listening by Dr Cindy Chen (Catch up Online)
This Art Talk was held on Wednesday 20 November 2024.
Abstract
As an early-career artist working between drawing, listening and sound, I am investigating trajectories of cultural exchange and transformation that have occurred through intergenerational migration, trade and colonisation in Southeast Asia, specifically in Malaysia where I was born. Fleeing poverty and civil war in China, my Hakka and Cantonese Chinese ancestors migrated to Penang and Perak in Malaysia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, seeking opportunities in trade, tin mining and rubber plantation industries. Similar to many descendants of Chinese migrants, I continue to navigate the nuances of Malaysian-Chinese identity; our language, culture and education have been indelibly shaped by British imperial systems and our family experiences of recent and historical global political events are entangled with colonial narratives. Furthermore, the porosity of Southeast Asian borders enabled dynamic transcultural shifts that continue to enrich and complicate understandings of our multifaceted identities.
Practicing as an Australian artist of Malaysian-Chinese heritage enables me to examine these cross-cultural impacts and extend upon existing practices to develop my own transcultural approach within a contemporary Australian context. This talk explores how three key phases within my artistic practice connect with Chinese cultural traditions through intuitive or referential ways. In early approaches to abstraction, I drew sound waves of Theravada Buddhist chants and Australian bird calls using ink and brush. My PhD research developed integrated listening and drawing methodologies through interactions with bamboo, rivers and mountains, the visual tropes of Chinese landscape painting tradition. Most recently, I began investigating the transcultural legacies of my grandmother’s cultural garments and grandfather’s coin collection through drawings, video and sculpture.
By engaging with East Asian ink practices and Chinese landscape painting through materials, visual elements and composition, and integrating these with contemporary drawing, listening and sound practices, I attempt to locate my practice in relation to my cultural homelands and the migratory trajectories of my ancestors. In doing so, I develop Southeast Asian Chinese diasporic cultural identity as a fluid, generative and intentional process that is inflected by historical events and practices and their contemporary interpretations.
About the Speaker
Dr Cindy Yuen-Zhe Chen practices in Sydney on unceded Darramuragal and Gadigal lands. Her drawing, sound and video works examine how embodied listening and sounding can extend experimental drawing as multi-sensory, emplaced processes. She has been commissioned for solo exhibitions nationally and internationally by institutions such as the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art at the Australian National Maritime Museum in 2022, Willoughby City Council in 2021 and the Ningbo Museum of Art in China in 2018. In an expansion of her creative practice, Dr Chen was invited to curate Lunar New Year public programs for the Art Gallery of NSW in 2023 and debuted a sound feedback live performance in the Essential Tremors Festival at Phoenix Central Park in 2022.
As a recipient of the University Postgraduate Award, Cindy Chen completed a Doctor of Philosophy at the University of New South Wales Art and Design in 2020 and presented her research internationally in England and China. She was selected as a finalist for the 2021/22 NSW Visual Arts Emerging Fellowship and the Hazelhurst Art on Paper Award in 2021/22 and 2023. In 2017, her work was selected by international curators for Art Nova 100, an exhibition of the top one hundred global Chinese artists under the age of thirty at Today Art Museum in Beijing. Dr Chen was a resident studio artist at Parramatta Artist Studios 2020-2023 (Parramatta and Epping) and has undertaken artist residencies at Akiyoshidai International Art Village in Japan and Hill End through Bathurst Regional Gallery.
