Initiated in response to the disruptions of COVID-19, the Digital Diasporas online research residency has finished after a two-year program, delivered by Yáo Collaborative.
Digital Diasporas was supported as a partnership between Creative Australia and Canada Council for the Arts, aiming to share policies, research and knowledge, and to facilitate collaborations and reciprocal exchanges between organisations and artists of both countries.
The 2023 residencies took place in May and June. Resident artists from Chinese diasporas in Australia, Canada and the United States were selected from over 350 applications, with Beau Lai, Ann Chen, Yutong Lin, Winnie Cheung and Kim Ye undertaking the exchange. Each artist was supported with AUD $10,000 for a program of international peer-to-peer learning and mentoring focussed on their experimental practice and research processes.
The following partner organisations provided advice, support and introductions to their networks for participating artists:
- Yáo Collaborative
- 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (Sydney)
- Gendai (Toronto)
- Asian Arts Initiative (Philadelphia)
Alice Nash, Executive Director, Arts Investment at Creative Australia said:
“We were very pleased to partner with the National Foundation for Australia-China Relations, and the Canada Council for the Arts on this initiative. These global virtual residencies have supported diasporic communities to build relationships and future pathways for collaboration.”
Sylvain Cornuau, Head of International Coordination, Cultural Diplomacy and Partnerships at the Canada Council for the Arts said:
“Digital Diasporas demonstrated the ability of public arts organisations to provide artists with innovative platforms that foster international creative and human connection. Through this project, artists were able to engage in critical dialogue on equity and sustainability during a time of global disruption. We hope this will continue to nurture important conversations across cultures.”
The media release from the inaugural edition can be viewed here.
Digital Diasporas 2023 was jointly funded by the Australian Government through Creative Australia (formerly known as the Australia Council for the Arts), the Canada Council for the Arts, the National Foundation for Australia-China Relations, and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
Creative Australia
Sean Brogan, Media Manager, Creative Australia
Mobile: 0498 123 541
Email: sean.brogan@creativeaustralia.gov.au
Canada Council for the Arts
Communications and Engagement
Phone: 613-239-3958 (Canada) / 1-800-263-5588 ext. 5151 (International)
E-mail: media@canadacouncil.ca
Winnie Cheung (4A Resident)
Winnie is a Hong Kong born, New York based filmmaker exploring a third culture, feminine body within the cross section of non-fiction, horror and arthouse cinema. She mixes fictionalized tales with half-truths for unsettling cinematic experiences. In 2019, Winnie’s morbid animated short Albatross Soup premiered at Sundance Hong Kong, won Vimeo Animation of the Year and Short of the Week’s “Short of the Year”. The following year, she co-produced and edited Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched, Kier-La Janisse’s epic feature length documentary on the history of folk horror which went on to win SXSW’s Midnighters Audience Award and Best Documentary at Fantasia International Film Festival. Most recently, Winnie co-wrote, directed, shot and co-edited her first feature film Residency which premiered at the 2023 International Film Festival Rotterdam and was acquired by Alief Films for world sales representation.
Beau Lai (Gendai Resident)
Beau Lai (formerly Lilly Lai) is an Artist and Writer currently based in the EU. Beau spent their formative years working intensively within the contemporary arts industry on Darug and Gadigal land in so-called Australia. Beau has been a practising artist for 6 years and has exhibited across France, South Korea, Thailand and Australia. Through video, performance, installation and text, they aim to investigate how power dynamics that exist in the gallery space and work towards imagining them anew.
Kim Ye (AAI Resident)
Kim Ye (all pronouns, b, 1984 Beijing, China) is a Chinese American multi-disciplinary artist whose research based practice encompasses performance, sculpture, video, installation, text, and social engagement. She received her MFA from University of California, Los Angeles (2012); and BA from Pomona College in Claremont, California (2007). Their work engages gendered constructions around power, labor, and taboo by activating the artist/viewer dynamic to create moments of authenticity, intimacy and exchange. Remixing appropriated forms from mainstream culture with media from personal archives, the work seeks to describe the entanglement between private spaces of desire and fantasy, and collective movements in discourse and ideology. Ye has exhibited, screened, and performed widely nationally and internationally at institutions such as The Getty, Hammer Museum, Wattis Institute, Banff Center for Arts, Material Art Fair, and Frieze Film Seoul among others. She has worked professionally as a dominatrix since 2011, and has been on the board of Sex Workers Outreach Project Los Angeles (SWOPLA) since 2019. He currently teaches in the Photo & Media department at California Institute of the Arts and co-hosts Boundary Issues on KChung Radio.
Yutong Lin and Ann Chen (yáo Residents)
Yutong Lin is a writer and image maker from Yunnan, China based in Montreal, Canada. As a Chinese-Nakhi descendant and media archivist, their practice concerns the fabrics of memories in the nomadic Himalayas and the diaspora. Using interactive media, computational arts, and documentary filmmaking as a way of mapping memories, they try to fabulate a different inhabitation by weaving and stitching family/public archives, found footage, and collective ethnography.
Ann Chen is a Taiwanese-American multimedia artist, educator and researcher. Her practice often begins with place-based research and has appeared as films, installations, writings, talks and workshops. Ecology, diasporic traces, archives, technology, human-land relations are a few themes present in her recent work. She is an Annenberg Civic Media Fellow at USC (2022-23) and an inaugural Fulbright-National Geographic Digital Storytelling Fellow to Canada.
Amy Lam
Amy Ching-Yan Lam is an artist and writer. She has shown performance, film, and exhibition projects internationally, both solo and as part of the art collective Life of a Craphead (with Jon McCurley). She was born in Hong Kong and lives in Toronto, Canada, which is the land of the Anishinaabe (Mississauga) nation, as well as the territory of the Wendat and Haudenosaunee.
Amy will be researching a body of work about property, domesticity, miniature dogs, “wasted” time, and dreaming, arising from minor histories of the Opium Wars.
Casey Tang
Casey is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher interested in sensory experiences that can attune lived world experience to ecological and biophysical processes in the context of planetary-scale systems from environmental to technological. He has exhibited in the US, Europe, and Asia.
Casey will develop a posthuman phenomenological framework utilising various disciplines, including physics, anthropology, and biology, threaded together by complexity science and biosemiotics to connect the “Human” back to “Nature,” Being to an emerging planetary-scale body and consciousness, and our semiosphere to the multilevel phenomena of ecological processes.
Tian Zhang
Based on Darug Country in western Sydney, Tian Zhang is an award-winning curator and changemaker working at the intersections of art and cultural practice. She is a founding co-director of Pari, a collective-run gallery in Parramatta.
Tian intends to work on a collaborative project to explore and critique the concept of the diaspora within settler colonial environments.