Reach me through
- Twitter @angelaytchan
My main projects are
- My research-based art practice
- Worm: art + ecology
- London Science Fiction Research Community (LSFRC) and formerly London Chinese Science Fiction Group
- I have also worked as a research consultant in international climate and cultural policy and currently research climate issues for major cultural institutions
Upcoming:
- Climate Stencil Workshops: tools for tracking personal climate data and feelings at for Radar (Loughborough), Centrale Fies + Feminist School (Italy) and tba (Wales)
- Water, land and borders - a walk + talk for SWAY in Barry
- LSFRC Online Reading Group SF & Extraction - Moonshot: The Indigenous Comics Collection, Vol. 3 (edited by Elizabeth LaPensée & Michael Sheyahshe)
- Scrapbooking the Wasteland – A Posthumanist Terror Management Theory Toolkit with Cristina Diamant and The Creative Posthumanism Team at Winchester School of Art
Current:
- Researching for my Sonic Acts environmental research residency OVEREXPOSED.
- Studying the CFG Nanodegree specialising in data science, sponsored by CFG
- Studing Cultural Instrastructure at The Barlett School of Architecture
Recent:
- Joined Abandon Normal Devices' Impossible Perspectives Lab XR (extended realities) residential talent development programme
- Developing new research on climate communication as artist in residence with Radar, Loughborough University
- Researched on international climate and cultural policy with climate arts charity Julie's Bicycle for their new report ahead of UN COP26
- Researched for the Wellcome Collection on youth climate justice and air pollution
- Recent public events: After Growth symposium at Nottingham Contemporary, workshop at Bow Arts, Seaweedy Reading Group, Terra Firma: The Politics of Earth at Whitechapel Gallery, Art and Ecology at Henry Moore Institute, Beyond the Anthropocene: Parallel State for Coventry Biennial 2021,Learning How to Live Together: A Symbiotic View of Life at Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA) Glasgow, Turbulence / Emergence / Enchantment: A Compendium of Climate Literacies at Cove Park
- I reject Festival UK* 2022 and have signed Migrants in Culture's Open Letter against the 'Brexit Festival', which carries the UK Government's racist, anti-immigrant nationalism. I believe it is a violent misuse of £120m in public funds during this pandemic. (The Angela Chan listed is not me)
I encourage you to please read, sign and share.
Image: Angela YT Chan
Art practice
My art making practice centres climate knowledges and communication through
co-learning anti-colonial climate narratives. It emphasises inclusive participation in everyday
local and global climate activism, challenging the systemic structures of climate
knowledge discourses (colonial histories, imperialist sciences). My work
includes video recordings (with an interest in environmental remote sensing technologies), drawings, collaborative interviews, and speculative fiction writing as modes of representing bodies of research.
I developed a project titled Rain Paradox (2021), which critiques
the language and climate communication methods of the UK’s 2020 Environmental Agency report,
"Great British Rain Paradox" on our imminent water scarcity. I also explore alternative
climate communication strategies that recentre marginalised experiences of climate impacts
in the UK. My project is supported by the FACT and
Jerwood Arts' Digital Fellowship and exhibited at FACT Liverpool as part of the residents' group show Uncertain Data.
I created [Export_Explode> (2021) a video work summarising my research into the international environmental and humanitarian legacies of the former Pitsea Explosives Factory, now the Wat Tyler Country Park. I produced it as a commissioned artist for Estuary 2021.
In October 2021, I carried out development research for my residency at Primary in Nottingham for their Nourishment: A Cyclical Programme
I will join Sonic Acts'
OVEREXPOSED as an environmental research resident, with my focus on long-term environmental pollutants of weapons within the cycles of climate and social injustice, protest and state sanctioned humanitarian and environmental violence worldwide.
I was part of the year-long Myco-Lective artist development programme through Chisenhale Gallery,
thinking about interspecies futures with other practitioners.
Image: [Export_Explode>, (2021) by Angela YT Chan
Worm: art + ecology
Since 2014, I have independently worked on Worm: art + ecology (wormworm.org), a long-term curatorial project
that communicates climate change issues through contemporary art and creative practices.
Through this, I produce online and gallery exhibitions, interviews with practitioners and
also deliver public workshops and talks focused on intersectional climate justice issues.
I have curated publicly funded gallery and online group exhibitions as Worm: art + ecology:
- Turbidity, a New Cinema Shorts programme for Abandon Normal Deviecs (AND) Festival, online (2021)
- Climate and Culture Beyond Borders for British Art Studies with my curatorial statement here, (2020)
- Climate Knowledges, Rotterdam, (2020)
- Refuse: (v)(n)(-), online, (2018)
- Tipping Points, Oslo, (2016)
Moving image: Worm: art + ecology logo by Al Walker
I work actively with science and speculative fiction through literature and art, collaborating with authors, translators and editors worldwide.
London Science Fiction Research Community (LSFRC)
I also co-direct the London Science Fiction Research Community (LSFRC). This year’s LSFRC theme for our monthly reading group and annual conference is SF & Extraction.
London Chinese Science Fiction Group
科幻研究在伦敦
Co-founding the London Chinese Science Fiction Group (LCSFG) (April 2019-April 2022), I co-curated the programme of translated readings and organise the monthly discussion meetings hosted at UCL, now online, facilitating discussions between readers, with the authors and translators.
Publication and writing
My writing is published in
Science Fiction (2020, MIT Press and Whitechapel Gallery), and I have
written about SF and interviewed science fiction authors for
Dream Babes Zine 2.0 (PSS) and for filmmaker
Cao Fei's London exhibition.
My paper Climate Change and Contemporary Chinese Science and Speculative Fiction:
Invisible, Extractive and Uneven Boundaries, is published in
SFRA Review, Vol. 51, No. 1. It situates Chinese climate SF within
the geopolitics of climate change and I presented it at LSFRC's
Beyond Borders: Empires, Bodies, Science Fictions conference, as well as the livestreamed and recorded
Hybrid Conference for FIBER Festival. Listen back here
Can Chinese Science Fiction Transcend Binary Thinking? a roundatable with Mia Chen Ma, Yen Ooi, Frederike Schneider-Vielsäcker, Regina Kanyu Wang and myself for the SFRA 2021 conference, and published in SFRA Review, vol. 51, no. 4, the flagship publication of the Science Fiction Research Association.
I wrote a short fiction Finding Space (2021) for the publication for Jerwood Arts.
Image: Cover of the publication Science Fiction (2020, MIT Press and Whitechapel Gallery)
Workshops
Alongside diverse public workshop facilitations through gallery and museum programming with adults (students, professional
practitioners and people with no prior experience), I also work
with youth groups (aged 14-19) on longer projects about creative and intersectional perspectives
on climate change. I deliver workshop series that introduce the colonial histories of
climate change and encourage wider and connecting discussions on racial, social and youth
activisms across climate justice activities.
I also navigate with young people how worldbuilding through science and speculative fiction could bring inclusive storytelling,
as an exciting way to create their own climate narratives that speak to their imagined futures.
Youth groups I have worked with include the
Art Assassins at South London Gallery (Summer 2019)
who self-directed their own
comic book project, and the
RawMinds Ambassadors at Wellcome Collection (April - September 2020),
who organised a
webinar event with invited speakers for other 14-19 year olds, to explore the globally uneven climate impacts of food,
‘sustainable’ fashion and futures.
Image: Illustration by Immy Perryman for the RawMinds Ambassadors' event with the Wellcome Collection.
Talks
I regularly give public talks as part of museum
and gallery exhibition programming, as well as conferences related to the climate, environmental,
technology and literary sectors.
Some institutions I have spoken at include Henry Moore Institure, ICA London, Stuart Hall Library / Iniva, Barbican, Barber Institute,
Somerset House, V&A Museum, London Design Biennale and many others.
I enjoy participating with grassroots arts and activism groups. I have spoken at events organised
by daikon* and Mother Tongues, and have also appeared on radio shows on stations like Resonance FM and Montez Press Radio.
Teaching
My teaching experience covers intersectional climate arts, creative climate communication, climate
change's colonial history and race, climate science fiction and worldbuilding.
I am a Visiting Artist Lecturer at a London art college and recent guest lectures for undergraduate and postgraduate courses include RCA, Architecture Association (AA), Falmouth University, CIEE and University of Kent.
Image: My talk at Somerset House for Earth Day 2018
Other collaborations
I was working collaboratively with Obsidian Coast’s year-long
Hypericum Working Group. It is a 'research project developing a collectively produced,
ever-evolving code of practice for feminist, antiracist, anticolonial and environmentally
sustainable arts organising'. This will foreground marginalised cultural workers to challenge
the uneven working environments within arts institutions and elsewhere in the sector.
For 2020, I was part of Rotterdam art gallery MAMA's 'Poule of Programme Makers' and we curated a
week-long programme
Gentle Strategising with local creative activist groups.
I also research for other artists' projects, notably climate science research for the
Otolith Group's film,
INFINITY Minus Infinity (2020), in which I also feature.
I'm interested in collaborating with others on climate and social justice issues beyond the arts. Here's
my summary for NüVoices, an international female and non-binary collective researching on China, and
their panel on gender and climate change.
Image: Sensing / Mapping (2020) by Angela Chan
All exhibitions have been fully funded, thanks to:
Image: Angela's moss and green screen nails, bts filming with Otolith Group 2019
I work freelance on these projects and am open to opportunities in the cultural, environmental,
educational and literary sectors. I also work across climate and sustainability research for arts organisations and institutions including Julie's Bicycle, Cape Farewell, both the Estates and Learning and Exhibitions departments at the V&A Museum, the Wellcome Collection, as well as in a sustainable architecture studio in Shanghai.
Residencies
Awards
Independent Research
Worm: art + ecology
Academic
CV and portfolio available upon request.
Web design by Angela YT Chan