Sichen Grace Chen, or “SG”, is a painter, illustrator, and visual arts educator who
resides as a first-generation Chinese-Canadian immigrant and settler on the
unceded, traditional, and ancestral territories of the Matsqui, Kwantlen, Katzie, and Semiahmoo First Nations, also
known as Langley.
Chen holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design
(RISD) and is pursuing her MFA at Emily Carr University of Art + Design (ECU).
She is the co-founder and creative director of Atelier Aloera, a climate creative organization and artist group for projects that foster connection and nurture community in the Lower Mainland.
With over 5 years of teaching experience in post-secondary institutions and private and non-profit arts organizations, she provides a
holistic curriculum of discovery-based learning and skill-building for all
ages.
Symbolized by the pairing of her Chinese name, Sī Chén (思辰), and her English name, Grace,
Chen is captivated by the complex relationships between seemingly disparate
ideas, objects, and identities. Growing up in Chengdu, China, for the first few
years of her life, and often moving between cities in British Columbia, has led
her to garner an appreciation for the sentimentality and physicality of natural
and synthetic landscapes and entities, and everything in between.
Her recent work explores water as a connective tissue between
paint, the body, and more-than-human ecologies. Chen’s large-scale paintings of
abstracted marine ecosystems make visible the often-overlooked contributors to
the climate solution, introducing a watery way of thinking and embodiment. She undulates between the traditional artist studio and
wet-field work, like intertidal zones, tide pools, sidewalk puddles, and the ocean. At these sites, she collects photographs, makes observational sketches using watercolour, and allows play to guide her process.
Using additive and subtractive painting methods, such as
dry-brushing, glazing, scraping, staining, and wiping with rags, she instills a
sense of fluidity and ephemerality. Pareidolia, the phenomenon in which the mind
perceives meaningful patterns or images in random stimuli, informs her improvisational
process, merging her bodily sensations and intuition with the material’s agency. The final paintings often emerge luminous and saturated, evoking warmth, vitality, and sometimes anger. Because she feels such
a profound emotional connection to these places and beings, these
colours bring her closer to them—almost like an internal waterbody reaching
toward an external one, skin to skin.
