Stir Cheat Sheet: Two artists worth checking out at Emily Carr University’s The Show — Stir

Sichen Grace Chen

Master of Fine Arts grad Sichen Grace Chen is a painter, illustrator, and educator whose work explores water as a connective tissue between all living things. Instead of blue, Chen’s semi-representational paintings capture the marine ecosystems of the Pacific Northwest through saturated and warm colours—a nod to both the warmth of the body and the realities of ocean warming. 

In When Every Vein is Red Out of the Blue, she’s sewn together scrap canvas pieces to form the basis of a towering, large-scale painting. 

“I intend to immerse the viewers in an underwater experience of engaging with the sheer height and gravitas of a bull kelp forest,” she says in her artist statement. “Through layering multiple water-based paints and inks, this painting has a predominantly chromatic grey tone which is a nod to not only the pollution from industries that seep into the Salish Sea, but also the constant greywater generated by homes and other buildings, such as artists’ studios.”