2020 MFA Thesis Work
Logics of Non-Exchange

Sidi He is a Chinese-Canadian artist working with mixed media. Born in Guangdong, China, she is currently living in New York.

Sidi He focuses on the notion of homeland in the context of globalization. In post 90’s China, urban landscapes in the real world have been consumed by countless screens. Combining the intimate experience of her childhood in the countryside and subtleties in her surrounding environment in several cities, Sidi questions how homelands exist in our imagination and how the collective experience of homeland resonates differently. She reshapes time, space and memory with images or objects taken on her own, and reorganizes them through the use of digital media into a virtual world. Sidi sees her art as a supplement to her root system and the answer to the origin of life in general.

Contemporary society is connected throughout the global, yet our roots to history and nature are disconnected through technological dislocation. Sidi is seeking to mediate these conflicting realities. She installed a piece called Echoes from Home when she went back to China, in 2020. She embodies 78 light bulbs in front and around many of the abandoned houses in her grandmother’s village in Meizhou. Connecting the flickering of the light bulb to an actual human heartbeat, as a metaphor for bringing the abandoned village back to life.