Sian Fan

Sian Fan’s interdisciplinary practice combines technology and performance to explore mixed identities, existing between worlds and what it means to be human in the digital age.

Sian Fan is an interdisciplinary artist whose work combines movement, the female body and technology to explore embodiment, spirituality and human experience in the digital age. Drawing on her background in contemporary and aerial dance she suspends, fragments and augments the body via choreography and digital techniques. She works across mediums, combining the physical and the virtual through sculpture, performance, animation, moving image and virtual and augmented reality.

Coming from mixed heritage (Chinese and British) her practice meditates on her own fragmented sense of identity, exploring what it means to exist in between worlds. She delves into her complicated connections with her own heritage, reflecting on diaspora, cultural imposter syndrome and the objectification of Asiatic bodies. She is particularly interested in the uneasy synchronicities between Asian and cyborgian bodies; in popularised depictions of Asiatic bodies in anime and video games; and in the thresholds of human identity where one exists as both and neither at the same time.

By extension she is fascinated by virtual identities, and in how we construct virtual bodies which exist in hyperspace beyond our physical bodies. She is concerned with the intangible nature of spiritual and metaphysical identity and with being human in our increasingly digitised and hyperconnected world. Through her work she hopes to discover new ways for us to coexist with technology.

During her residency Sian will focus on researching and developing work that explores her Chinese and British heritage. She aims to connect with her Chinese culture more deeply, whilst reconciling this with the perspective of her heavily mediated, Westernised upbringing. She hopes to realise performative and digital works that meditate on her personal insecurities, realities, and fantasies. In particular she is researching techno-orientalism and the uneasy synergies between cyborgian and Asian bodies that are present in video games, anime and movies.