The Lind jury, including internationally acclaimed contemporary artist Brian Jungen, said Wei’s ‘development in her work shows maturity and great promise.’
Reviews and recommendations are unbiased and products are independently selected. Postmedia may earn an affiliate commission from purchases made through links on this page.
“We are appreciative of the contributions made by the five artists included in this year’s Lind Biennial: Mena El Shazly, Karice Mitchell, Dion Smith-Dokkie, Parumveer Walia, and Casey Wei,” said a statement from the jury, which included Grace Deveney from the Art Institute of Chicago, acclaimed contemporary artist Brian Jungen, and the Hammer Museum’s interim chief curator Aram Moshayedi. “Wei’s installation, The Zhang Clan, is a compelling document of diasporic experience, upending the conventions of documentary filmmaking and offering insight into the personal anecdotes that are specific to geographic displacement.
“The Zhang Clan successfully transposes her DIY aesthetics and community-based art into a gallery setting. This development in her work shows maturity and great promise, as this artist spatially translates her accomplishment in film into exhibition contexts.”
Wei, the co-founder and editor of Reissue magazine, and programmer for the Vancouver International Film Festival’s Short Forum program, is currently pursuing her PhD in Contemporary Arts at SFU.
Wei’s recent works include the book Tuning to Oblivion: an artist residency (M: ST Performative Art, 2023), and the album Stimuloso (Mint Records, 2022) with her band, Kamikaze Nurse. Since 2015, she has been programming and sometimes playing in her concert series, art rock?
“My practice is discursive, ephemeral, and social — I seek to engage my peers to build the community in which I want to make work,” says Wei. “The overarching intention behind my projects is to create a history that prioritizes everyday life as the site of transformation — artistically, socially, politically. Materially, it often manifests in projects where I act as director, work with numerous collaborators, and result in various documents to be disseminated thereafter.
“I often use multimedia and multi-narrative strategies of representation, as much of my work is event-based, collaborative, and iterative. One project can have many components: a book, a performance, a video, a concert — or be shown in different contexts: a single-channel film in a cinema; an installation in a gallery; online for posterity.”
The Lind Prize was established in 2015, and is awarded biannually to an emerging B.C.-based artist working across the mediums of film, photography, or video. Artists are nominated by staff and faculty from established arts institutions, organizations, and post-secondary programs from across the province.
Previous Lind Prize winners are: Simranpreet Anand (2023), Charlotte Zhang (2021), Laura Gildner (2020), Jessica Johnson (2019), Christopher Lacroix (2018), Marisa Kriangwiwat Holmes (2017), and Vilhelm Sundin (2016).