About
Ziui Chen Vance is from Neijiang, Sichuan, China. She spent her childhood amongst the hilly terrain of Sichuan Province, and in 2002 graduated with top honors from the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute with a degree in studio art. Her facilities within art and design garnered her extended studies at the famed Tsinghua University in Beijing. In 2010, Chen continued her studies by moving abroad to the United States, receiving her MFA, and studying the intersection of art and design.
Her work combines painted and printed mural methodologies with digital sculpting, augmented reality, and virtual projection for production in painting, illustration, and emerging media. She graduated from Sichuan Fine Arts Institute with a degree in studio art and Industrial Design, Tsinghua University in Beijing. Chen continued her studies in the United States at the University of Michigan, where she received her Masters in Fine Arts. After years of researching inclusive design, her work in art and design speaks to the human body as its language, with infinite communicative power. Ziui Chen is a 2022 recipient of the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant, a 2022 Fellow with The Center for Emerging Visual Artists - Philadelphia, and a 2023 Sustainable Arts Foundation Award Winner.
In the area of fine arts, I am a generalist, as I can teach a range of courses across various levels. At Tyler, these include undergraduate painting courses at the 200 level and technology-centered painting workshops introducing digital methods with a program of analog painting processes and digital modeling, sculpting, and representation techniques to undergraduate and graduate students. At the same time, with my research into finding new, accessible ways to describe, articulate, and distribute visual works, I bring the added value of depth and interest in using emerging technologies to acquire and translate source material into new concepts using artificial intelligence platforms. I have also taught a workshop seminar that focuses on these alternative sources of creativity in the generation, scanning, and projection of experiences in painting and painterly representation.
After years of researching inclusive design, her work speaks to the human body as its language, with infinite communication. First, in mediums more attuned to her earlier fine art training, and more recently in ways that position the body in painting as an ecosystem of changes in attitude, position, and gesture that connects us with other bodies and spaces. Each work explores her ethnicity's perception as an infinite tapestry of imagery associated with her exoneration from the polar complexities of being Chinese in the United States. Although her more recent works visually contrast with where she began, she continues experimenting by reinterpreting traditional periods of art into a unique aesthetic.
MFA, University of Michigan, Stamps School of Art and Design
BA, Tsinghua University, Academy of Arts and Design