Personal Statement

Yuling Chen

As a child I grew up in a lower middle class household in China on a remote island called Hainan island. My parents have distinguished roles: my dad was the breadwinner; my mother was the housewife. They sent me to boarding schools first so they could have more free time at home besides childrearing. Since then I have been interested in studies of art, information and human behaviors. I have completed projects in schools examining the knowledge I received about them. 

For example I attended a Cambridge English training camp at Haikou jingshan school where I studied in the summer around 2009. During the camp I gathered stories about other campers through active communications. I have written short English essays about them and later diaries about their various personas, personalities and behaviors. My mother found out about my diaries and was rather brash about them asking who these people were. I was adamant and told her the truth they were just classmates. Then out of defiance I tore the pages out of my diaries and made them some sort of performance project about writing, speeches and freedom to do them. She got interested and wondered it had things to do with who I was writing about. She went to school to ask the teachers to change seats for me out of curiosity. Then my seats were changed. I decided to do a different project folding origami with papers. It got many classmates to ask me what it was about and wanted those origami games. I told them it was about their stories they told and the music I was listening to. They were shocked about the projects. We gathered and talked about the projects’ potentialities for long time to get a conclusion that information has shaped the outcome of human behavior. 

In 2010, I was selected to attend 2+2 exchange program with university of Prince Edward Island while attending Sichuan university. I took several biology, chemistry and drama classes to improve my English at the university of Prince Edward Island. I was selected to work as a research assistant at a research initiative in the university called advanced interdisciplinary research in singing (AIRS). I approached the job through an all immersive vocal training experiment with the local vocal singing teacher and using the newest technology and method such as social media, facebook, etc. , to make posters and recruit participants from the university and immigrant communities. This has given me a comprehensive outlook on my research about intergenerational communities and singing. I sat down in the lab to interview them, recorded our conversations and transcribed the interviews later on pen and paper and computers. It turned out the information about their family backgrounds, experiences with singing and immigration have played important parts on how these participants form a community in Canada. I was inspired by this findings and put them as research data into my reports and works. My supervisor, dr. Annabel Cohen, and my colleagues were also interested in this aspect of my research publishing them in the annual reports in 2012. 

In 2017, I was selected to attend a class called global experience project at OCAD university to study with the renowned artist and filmmaker, Isaac Julien. His influential approach to making documentaries through narrative arts, performances and archival materials has set my practice in stone. I made videos in the classes about how information gained in the urban spaces and environments changes and alters the human behaviors when they are in contact. Julien and other professors, Paulette Philips and Derek Liddington, in the class saw my works and soon talked about how they wanted to change their approach to art making, cropping images from their video works and made them archival grade photography to be exhibited at different exhibitions, galleries and museums. It has significantly changed how I thought about information staring to realize it as an art form which has potentials to change people’s perceptions and behaviors. 

In 2019 I graduated from OCAD university and worked as an intern at Farsi cinema centre. On the job I have completed valid original research on the web writing about Farsi cinema, Oscar’s and other film festivals. I have found out how this type of information shifted how my supervisors, the editors, in the organization perceive my works and writings. They input valuable insights from their own works such as how their research of information contributed to the organizations’ development on the web. I studied intensely of their works and gained insights on how to manage these information in my works. It was a brief experience. But it was great considering how I took a leap and landed on the conclusions of how information was processed and used in the nonprofit organizations. 

In 2023 I was diagnosed with psychosis in the mental health hospital at CAMH in Toronto. I didn’t let this distraught experience affect my life by continuing my research and writings in my personal projects writing about human behaviors on my artistic blogs. These works have largely reminded me of my upbringing in Haikou, China, my father who passed away in 2017 due to cancer and my mother who came to visit and decided to immigrate to Canada. I have found the information I got through cohabiting with these facts and my mother such as the perception of Hong Kong protests, news and urban events has greatly contributed to my research, and artistic practice. It has aided me in terms of making works about these media narratives and news changing my perspective on events and people. I have gained experiences and insights in terms of how I made performances part of my writings and videos changing and shifting the urban behaviours around me from a conservative standpoint to a more progressive patterns of liberal art making and movements.