Meet the Artist

Jenny

Tchen

Drawing and painting

“By re-interpreting and abstracting experiences from within the Western hegemonic framework I was raised in, the conflict I feel internally becomes tangible and identifiable. Cultivating methods to witness self-hood through ways that I was taught not to, I reflect on the impending violence of resisting a displaced sense of self, and its ramifications on the generation and perception of my identity.”

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Jenny Tchen is a Chinese Vietnamese artist based in Tkaronto/Toronto, with a BFA majoring in Drawing and Painting at OCAD University. Responding in paint and mixed media she contextualizes and re-appropriates culturally displaced symbologies imbued in her experiences as a first-generation Asian woman and artist. Jenny Tchen recollects on complicated intimacies between herself and subtextual objects grounded in familial narratives of displacement and its relationship to her archeological position in “Canada.” Seeking to process trauma, closure, and ideas of home, she engages with unstable notions of the diasporic self and migratory emplacement through the contorted, escapist imagery in her work.
OCAD U - Faculty of Art
Drawing and Painting
Major Completed, 2023

Drawing and Painting

2023, Gradex Thesis Show
OCAD University
2023, Paraline
Midnight Arcade
2023, DTSU Third Space Launch
Hart House
2022, Navigating Identity in the Asian Diaspora
Ada Slaight Gallery
2019, Impressions: A Celebration in Art, Commerce and Culture
A Different Booklist Cultural Centre
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