Cindy Yuen-Zhe Chen
Featuring Phuong Ngo, Marikit Santiago & Jayanto Tan
’Dismantle / Assemble’
9 April – 22 May, 2026
Thursday 16 April: Exhibition Launch
Friday 17 April: Art in Action: A Professional Development Workshop for Emerging Artists
Wednesday 22 & 29 April, 13 May: Echoes
Saturday 16 May: Auslan Tour
Accessibility
Auslan videos and audio descriptions can be accessed in the gallery via a series of QR codes.
Audio descriptions for Dismantle / Assemble have been co-designed by Sarah Empey, Natasha Frazer, and Anthia Balis, and aim to provide enhanced accessibility for all visitors, including those who are blind or have low vision. Verge encourages patrons to bring their own headphones. Tactile floor markings are also provided in the gallery for visitors using white canes.
Auslan video guides have been developed by Angie Goto and Sue Jo Wright for the d/Deaf and hard of hearing community. The Auslan videos can be viewed on individual mobile devices.
Cindy Yuen-Zhe Chen, Touching Places Past and Present - Penang, 2026, birch plywood, tung nut oil, sound transducers, H 60 x W 582.8 x D578.5mm. Photography by Jessica Maurer.
Artist Statement
Dismantle / Assemble by Cindy Yuen-Zhe Chen holds stories of tactility told through encounters my artist’s maternal grandfather’s coins and grandmother’s cultural garments. By engaging with historical and personal narratives of European colonisation in Southeast Asia, the works examine how we craft meaning from versions of history to shape our understanding of the present.
A four-channel video work made in collaboration with artists Phuong Ngo, Marikit Santiago and Jayanto Tan reflects upon our trajectories of intergenerational migration and cultural transmission, foregrounding the complex cultural identities of Southeast Asian migrant peoples in Australia. Tactile sound sculptures explore our sense of emplacement, inviting people to encounter sonic waterways in Sydney and Melbourne by touching carved surfaces that merge topographies of our cultural homelands in Southeast Asia with colonial coins.
The search for a homeland is ever present in drawings of my grandfather’s coin collection which trace my family’s history of migration from China to Malaysia and Australia, and drawings of my grandmother’s sarong kebaya articulate the multifaceted nature of diasporic Chinese identity. From these familial archives emerge reimagined histories that allow me to weave multiple perspectives of my present self in an Australian context, also fraught and contested in its colonial past and present.
Artist Bio
Cindy Yuen-Zhe Chen practices in Sydney on unceded Darramuragal and Gadigal lands. Her drawing, sound and video works examine Southeast Asian Chinese diasporic identity as a generative and emplaced process. Chen has held solo exhibitions nationally and internationally with 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art at the Australian National Maritime Museum in 2022, Willoughby City Council in 2021 and the Ningbo Museum of Art in China in 2018. Chen was selected as a finalist for the 2025 Fisher’s Ghost Award Open and Contemporary categories and the 2021/22 NSW Visual Arts Emerging Fellowship. She curated Lunar New Year public programs for the Art Gallery of NSW in 2023. As a recipient of the University Postgraduate Award, she completed a PhD at the UNSW Art and Design in 2020.
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body, and supported by the NSW Government through the Create NSW - Creative Steps New Work grant.
