Jes [she/they] is an emerging interdisciplinary designer and performance artist trained in architecture. Using the body as a vessel and the face as a site, she is interested in exploring our collective posthuman and somatic futures [read: cyborg, multiple, & felt].
She works from the unceded and ancestral lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ Nations, otherwise known as ‘Vancouver’.
Specifically of mixed Czech-Cantonese-Vietnamese heritage and as a feminine East-Asian presenting womxn, the fields which influence her work encompass ornamentalism, somatics, critical studies, and speculative-fictions/futurities. She circles the idea of identity and embodiment via its racialized, gendered, and artifical edges; the fuzzy space between subject/object, ornament/human, and body/image. Her art has recently been exhibited at the Bachir/Yerex Presentation Space [2022], Design at Riverside Gallery [2022], the Art Gallery of Mississauga [2022], Stackt Market [2021], and the Art Gallery of Peterborough [2020]. She is preparing to debut ‘Latent Shores’ this September at Luna Arts Fest in Revelstoke, BC. It is a work that fuses Cantonese Opera, rope, traditional Chinese knotting, pulse sensors, and dance.
Jes is the Editorial Lead at Chinatown Today, an organization dedicated to sharing and celebrating stories of Vancouver’s Chinatown. She is also on the board of the Vancouver Cantonese Opera Society and is a registered intern architect with the Architectural Institute of British-Columbia (AIBC). This work in Chinatown and in architecture fuels her spatial and structural imaginings of a future beyond what we now know.