Advancing Research Capacity
May 2026 (ARC x Asian Heritage Month)
Sun Forest
Sun Forest is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice is shaped by a lifetime of movement between South Korea, Canada, and the United States. Working across sculpture, performance, video, and installation, she examines how imperial legacies and transgenerational hauntings imprint themselves on bodies, materials, and landscapes, while imagining forms of resilience, care, and speculative reorientation. Recent residencies include the European Ceramic Work Centre, Arctic Circle, Belkin Gallery with the Quantum Matter Institute, Eastern Edge Artist-Run Centre, and BANFF. She has received support from the BC Arts Council, Canada Council for the Arts, Centrum Foundation, and Griffin Art Projects, and is a SSHRC Doctoral Fellow at SFU.
How Long Have You Been in Eternity is an installation series that traces how histories move through bodies, materials, and generations. Placenta jars, inspired by the tae-hangari ritual of Joseon Korea, are reimagined as open vessels holding projected archival footage of migration, U.S. occupation, and diasporic grief. Surrounding forms including ceramic doorframes, cast arachnids, and biomaterial flora suggest thresholds, militarized ecologies, and the entanglement of domestic and political life. Together, they create an environment of layered memory and unresolved belonging. The work frames diaspora not as return, but as an ongoing practice of care, where home is continually made and remade across distance and time.
Sybil Xyshen
Sybil Xyshen (she/her) is a Chinese-Canadian interdisciplinary artist, writer, performance-maker and actor, currently based in Vancouver, BC. She graduated from Simon Fraser University with a Bachelor of Arts in Arts, Performance, and Cinema Studies. Sybil distrusts nouns. She unravels adjectives in the attempt to reconstruct each examined viscus of the human experience with a non-discursive, imaginal lexicon. In her work she commits acts of transgression to investigate different states of beings. Her practice focuses on the formlessness of femininity and the interplay of senses catalyzed by embodiment.
3 acts of love (adj.) is a multimedia performance that investigates the parallels between criminal interrogation and confrontation in its many forms – audience to performer, listener to speaker, lover to lover etc., through the metaphor of romance. Rejecting the common phrase “love is a verb,” here love is defined as “a state of being” into which one can fall, just as one falls into dreams, silence, paralyses or death. This work is a reminder that love is a renegotiation of boundaries and asks the audience to reclaim romance as something more intuitive, impulsive and intrusive than what is socially accepted.
Joshua Ongcol
Josh is a Dubai born, Queer, Filipinx artist that is currently a settler on the unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples. He draws from his background in street dance and contemporary training and trains in various movement forms including Qi Gong, West African Dance and Arnis. Josh is interested in the ways tenderness manifests in the body, its receptivity to deep connection, wisdom, and transformation and is interested in crossing mediums to create immersive experiences. With this, Josh aims to unravel the narrative of the Filipnx diaspora; specifically of intergenerational exchange, lineage of resilience, concept of “home” and “KAPWA,” and finding the pathways of queerness and reclaiming spirituality.
“The E.N.D.” or “The Energy Never Dies” is a dynamic live music and dance work inspired by the concept of the cypher, Qi gong and House dance culture. My reflections on E.N.D. were pulled toward how our environment becomes a type of participant and contributor to the piece. The END explores the club as church, worship and solace. This next phase of E.N.D explores the collaboration of dance and music, experimenting with various recordings of cityscape/ ambient sound. The live performances in the cypher is an immersive experience knitting together our personal histories and culture of street dance within the music score.
April 2025
Mind of a Snail
Mind of a Snail is an ongoing collaboration between two artist-weirdos: Chloe Ziner & Jessica Gabriel. We first met in 2003 and since then, we’ve been developing a unique style of mostly wordless visual storytelling that combines puppetry, projections (often using old-school overhead projectors), clown/physical theatre, and original music. We have toured our original performances and taught workshops across Canada, US, Taiwan, Brazil and in a couple weeks, South Korea. Toronto’s Now Magazine has called our work “nothing short of magical” and Winnipeg Free Press said “the ingenuity and artistry on display is breathtaking”.
We have been devising a new tour-able two person show, the working title is “The Feast”. It’s currently about 50% of the way there. Imagine a table, set with a meal, and a camera for live video, connected to a projector. On a large screen, we layer analog shadow puppetry into the digital projections. These elements can interact with each other and our bodies as performers in lots of fun and surprising ways. Shadow theatre lets us reveal hidden layers, and show what’s inside things. Live video allows us to play with size, scale & perspectives. We’ve been exploring stories that feature giants (ie Jack & the Beanstalk) from different angles: queer, feminist, decolonial, intersectional & class-aware.
Kevin Nguyen
Kevin is a Studio 58 graduate from December 2022. Since graduating, he’s been fortunate enough to work with companies such as The Women’s Company, Green Thumb Theatre, Pacific Theatre, and Ruby Slippers Theatre. Having performed as the lead role in a few films, as well as premieres at Toronto and Vancouver Asian Film Fest, he is no stranger to the on-camera world either. As an artist he am most drawn to physical story-telling, especially of the strange and unconventional kind. He has fond memories of first stumbling upon Crystal Pite’s ‘The Statement’. It revealed a new perspective on the possibilities of theatre to him in a way he did not think was possible.
‘On a hot summer evening in the countryside of Vietnam, my father was followed home by something. He was returning from a trip at the grocery store when a strange feeling passed over him. As the sun set and his vision faded, all that was left before him was a path shrouded in darkness. That’s when he heard it…’ For the next portion of the process, I am interested in projection to further heighten the atmosphere of the story. Alongside illustrator Videl (@imgdist_000), we plan to create visual backdrops of a Vietnam countryside that descends into a more ghastly and disturbing environment.
David C. Jones
A graduate of Studio 58, David has been devising and/or producing theatre for some time now. His latest show – Spaced Out – has gotten a lot traction, both as a kids show and an adult show. It uses the analogy of space travel in a broken starship in place of mental health and trauma in day to day life.
Spaced Out was developed through dramaturge Kim Selody and supported by Presentation House Theatre. The first version, directed by Nelson Wong and now dubbed First Voyage, was presented at the Fringe where it sold out. It is now being adapted for an adult audience to play in Whistler with a tour planned in the fall.
December 2024
Alexandra Caprara
Alexandra is a queer interdisciplinary artist whose practice is grounded in performance making and design. With a focus on creating new movement based works that feature integrated design, she has worked internationally as a director, performer, and designer for lighting and video, and has presented her work across Canada alongside companies such as WorkMan Arts, Factory Theatre, Theatre Replacement, and GoodWoman Dance. She is a recent MFA graduate from SFU’s School for the Contemporary Arts, where her research centered around design lead creation processes, real time composition, and integrating lighting and video design as collaborators within performance.
“I used my time to research and experiment with the technical setup for my upcoming project, “gently divine, violently disorienting” (GDVD). This piece explores the collaboration between technology and performers as co-authors, and examines the ways queer individuals can utilize technology and online spaces as a tool for imagining our own ideas becoming. Using a live feed video projection and digital video “loop- pedal” I’ve created, the performers create compositions using their bodies in real time, in an attempt to introduce new versions of themselves that exist in a digital reality. I spent this time working solo to experiment with some composition ideas using this set up. Working in Left of Main allowed me to incorporate lighting effects, multi-channel video, and sound into these experiments, which allowed me to both discover how these elements interact together, and explore new ways of abstracting the body on stage using light and video.”
SQx Dance
SQx furthers the development of dance and public engagement in the arts through performance and interactive outreach programming.
They provide flexible touring series for arts venues, public schools, and conservatories to bring performances and interactive programming to both large & small communities.
They use dance to make the world a better place.
HURRICANE is part 2 of a new 3-year dance creation project series where we’re reflecting on the changing planet. This project was initiated with Canadian Heritage Youth Take Charge funding. The work was presented at Akropoditi Dance Festival (2017) & International Festival of Tale & Arts (2019) in Morocco (funded by Global Affairs Canada). The work doesn’t use lights & instead combines dance shadows with projection. The projection has 36,000 pictures moving quicker than the eye can decipher—flickering in rainbow order.
