Chelsie Coates is an artist whose practice intersects a wide variety of mediums including (but not restricted to); installation, performance, text, sculpture, printmaking, and video. The specific medium of her work is not so much important as the conceptualisation and inner personal dialogue that the materials convey. As a young Chinese-Trinidadian and White-British artist who has the palatability of passing as white, she has struggled with feelings surrounding her ethnicity since young, and that is reflected in her work through authenticity, micro-aggression, displacement, diaspora and a completely personal insight to her emotions on the subject.
Her work often takes recognisable or even appropriated “authentic” Chinese articles such as the fortune cookie, jiaozi, lucky cats and cheongsam and it tries to push the limitations of the object in context to herself, an artist who perhaps is not be deemed Chinese enough to use these cultural objects without causing offence to the traditions of Chinese culture due to her passing. A main area of her practice is the raw, personal writings and poems that present more as streams of consciousness rather than structured and edited text. These are highly influenced by the poet Mary Jean Chan.
Her practice centres around a continuous question and argument, which is greatly influenced by artists whose work goes hand in hand as socio-political and racial statements such as Adrian Piper, Ai Wei Wei, Nam June Paik and Felix Gonzales Torres. Their work inspires her to further question ideas of racial ambiguity, authenticity, and the internal crisis it causes Coates and perhaps many other mixed race children and adults out there.
Coates treads a very fine line of appropriation and re-claiming ones culture as she tries to also push medium boundaries in art. She is currently working on expanding her performative and installation based work. Giving her the chance to create a more interactive and accessible platform for her practice, so that she can educate and reach the wider public with the issues highlighted in her practice.
Her work often takes recognisable or even appropriated “authentic” Chinese articles such as the fortune cookie, jiaozi, lucky cats and cheongsam and it tries to push the limitations of the object in context to herself, an artist who perhaps is not be deemed Chinese enough to use these cultural objects without causing offence to the traditions of Chinese culture due to her passing. A main area of her practice is the raw, personal writings and poems that present more as streams of consciousness rather than structured and edited text. These are highly influenced by the poet Mary Jean Chan.
Her practice centres around a continuous question and argument, which is greatly influenced by artists whose work goes hand in hand as socio-political and racial statements such as Adrian Piper, Ai Wei Wei, Nam June Paik and Felix Gonzales Torres. Their work inspires her to further question ideas of racial ambiguity, authenticity, and the internal crisis it causes Coates and perhaps many other mixed race children and adults out there.
Coates treads a very fine line of appropriation and re-claiming ones culture as she tries to also push medium boundaries in art. She is currently working on expanding her performative and installation based work. Giving her the chance to create a more interactive and accessible platform for her practice, so that she can educate and reach the wider public with the issues highlighted in her practice.
