Meet Siyu Chen | Visual Artist

We had the good fortune of connecting with Siyu Chen and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Siyu, why did you pursue a creative career?
I think a fundamental aspect of my artistic practice has been the care for the vulnerable moments within human interaction and emotion. I believe in softness as means of resisting the asymmetrical power distributions prevalent in everyday life. While I’ve explored various outlets for expressing this belief, such as designing products and teaching, none of them have felt as genuine and transformative as art. Ultimately, I am making art because there is no other way.

Art, to me, is one of the rarest disciplines—it’s not about finding the ‘right’ answer through reasoning alone, but about embracing questions and living with uncertainty about the future. I never know exactly how my next project will take shape. Factors beyond art-making, such as income, relocations, and the broader socio-economic context, influence how I view subject matters and improvise with materiality. Nevertheless, I can always be honest with myself and choose in accordance with the current stage of life.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
My practice revolves around drawing, video, and experimental writing. It exists between autofiction, process-based art, and performance. I don’t identify with a single medium but rather with the history, process, and knowledge production of image-making. I often explore macro geopolitical climates through the micro lens of everyday life. This might involve conversations with others, tidying a room, viewing oneself in a mirror, or recalling dreams.

Image-making is the backbone of my art, a practice that traces back to my childhood in Shanghai, during a period of unforeseen changes – from family matters and socio-economic shifts to the overnight demolition of large-scale landscapes and buildings, followed by gentrification. Drawing became a rare moment of reflection, allowing me to make sense of life’s fast-paced moments. This process of image-making resembles journaling and automatic writing, where narratives emerge in the process. However, I was never aiming for an accurate depiction of the past like a history painter or a documentary artist viewing through the camera lens. Instead, I found myself immersed in the act of remembering and reconstructing within the pictorial space. This practice of drawing and writing as a means of remembering and reconstructing continues to be a central aspect of my artistic practice today.

Last year, I began to explore time-based media as I started writing about the fluidity of meanings in my diary. I am fascinated by video and performance, as they create spaces to reveal the development of actions through time, whereas still images offer an overall impression or a snapshot of another world, presented all at once. It’s not that one is better than the other, but rather they offer two very different relationships to text and image. I usually finish a drawing quite fast, as I aim to capture the momentary thought. I would say I draw as I write in my diary. When it comes to video, it’s about revisiting ideas from past life, drawing, and writing all at once and then choosing what to include.

Currently, I am wrapping up “Where Shall I Go,” a video art piece exploring the experience of the sublime – the feeling of greatness beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement, or imitation – in relation to the post-Covid world. The sublime experience varies from the inability to see the scenery behind the fog to the uncertainty of the future. Drawing from diary entries, talk shows, and Western and Chinese art and philosophy, the narrative unfolds from a conversation between two aspects of the same person. One believes in the need to overcome the sublime by becoming a successful writer, while the other believes there is no such concept as the sublime, and therefore nothing needs to be overcome.

Despite my multimedia artistic practice, I come from a painting major in undergrad and had aspirations of creating gigantic paintings. In school, we had assignments involving paintings that were 6 feet and above. Though it was good practice, I was always troubled by the cost of art materials and the shipping of large-scale artworks, especially as someone who constantly relocates. I used to wonder whether my inability to paint stemmed from a lack of talent. Later, I realized how much privilege – whether financial or space-wise – is associated with the medium of painting. In the past, paintings served as functional objects in the Western world, with painters being commissioned for murals and portraits. Though the function of painting has been supplanted by photography, modern predecessors such as Hilma af Klint and O’Keeffe (which I admire!) had the means to work on and store paintings.

The turning point in my practice came when I became involved in practicing improvisation, first through collaborative performances at the Arts, Letters, and Numbers residency (Upstate New York), and later through speech and body improvisation and automatic writing at the Cenote Cosmos project (Shanghai). Presumptions about forms are dissolved into observation, listening, and intuition, where responses are realized spontaneously during the process of interacting with the outer world. Though it took about five years for me to unlearn what worked for others, I am glad that I took the time to be honest with the alienation I felt from painting. None of the decisions that I make in my practice – whether it’s the shift from painting to making video art or choosing what to write about – can be summarized into “the” advice for all if someone asks me. Instead, I would say realizing what works best for yourself, and knowing that it is going to change, is the key.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
Currently I am based in Brooklyn New York. Outside of my studio practice, I spend a lot of time in the city planning for meals and doing grocery shopping, whether for sole meals or gathering. If a friend visits me for a few days, I will take them out to for Tibetan or Thai food in Jackson Height. Then I will take them to my favorite grocery stores, but it really depends on which neighborhood we are at. Some of the places I go to the most often are Metropolitan Seafood (East Williamsburg, Brooklyn), Deluxe Food Market (Manhattan Chinatown), 3 Aunties Thai Market (Jackson Height, Queens) and IndoJava (Elmhurst, Queens). Since now the weather is getting warmer, it would be nice to go have a picnic at Sunset Park, where you get to see the sunset with the cityscape as the backdrop from somewhere that is a bit less crowded than Manhattan.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
Friends and mentors along the way in Chicago, Providence, New York and Shanghai. My parents and my grandmother who support me enormously and inspire me.

Instagram: siyuseesee

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Image Credits
Bio photograph by: Qiuyu Wu