Gregg Mizuta

Jazz Szu-Ying Chen, Surel’s Place Artist in Resident, with Antonius-Tín Bui, James Castle House Artist in Resident at the James Castle House, Boise, Idaho, November 5, 2022.

Antonius-Tín Bui (they/them/theirs) is a spontaneous shapeshifter and poly-disciplinary artist with roots all over the country. They play in the realms of hand-cut paper, community engagement, performance, and soft sculpture to visualize hybrid identities and histories that confront the unsettling present. Their identity as a queer, genderfluid, Vietnamese-American informs the way they employ beauty as a refuge for fellow marginalized communities.

Jazz Szu-Ying Chen is a Taiwanese artist currently residing in Taipei, Taiwan. She has exhibited regularly in Europe, Taiwan, with one of her biggest solo shows to date at Taipei’s Chini Gallery. She also regularly collaborates with notable medical and electronic music organizations. Jazz’s subjects of focus span over her interest in the beauty and grotesque within the field of anatomy/medical historical imageries, to Nordic and Chinese mythologies and folklore such as “Classics of Mountains and Seas.” She manipulates the dissected anatomical imageries and creates tableaus with mythological monsters, dissected bodies, and botanical details. The tableaus are meant to tell stories regarding the cultural clashes, her views on superstition, reflections from her Taiwanese roots, and they also function as social commentaries on the currently turbulent contemporary society. In her most recent body of work, she explores the complicated “love” among familial relationships and contradicting ideas of familial boundaries between eastern and western cultures while using classical symbols such as ouroboros as their carriers.