Snack Witch Joni Cheung

Snack Witch Joni Cheung’s interdisciplinary practice is a ritual molding their investigations around the fluid relations between the self, objects, places, and communities they position themselves in. Marinating on how the bodies and objects of Chinese heritage teeter between transparency ↔ opacity under the orientalist/capitalist gaze, and the use of digital technologies/memories by diasporic communities to imagine beyond colonial narratives: they layer (moving) images from archives and contemporary media, words, sound(scapes), objects, and places. This site-engaged methodology simmers into community-oriented and participatory installations conjured up with sculptures, performances, experimental texts, print media, sound, photographs, and videos—transforming accumulated ephemera overlooked by those outside of their communities.

Their work draws from the banal: everyday objects, businesses, and people. They suture ragged pieces of stories and things—juxtaposing the unspectacular and often ignored with eye-catching elements that have been historically used to exoticize and ostracise Chinese food, people, culture, and places. Their practice seeks to stop overconsumption: Questioning those who feel they have the right to endlessly consume the food and cultures of those they see as other.

Learning through decolonial love, queer and liminal spaces, haunting, research ethics, and Black redaction/annotation from Indigenous and Black creatives/scholars: bell hooks, M. NourbeSe Philip; Legacy Russell; Eve Tuck; Christina Sharpe; and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, guides them towards more caring, gentle, and reciprocal approaches to research and making. Their textu(r)al practice hides in plain sight—using takeout menus; candies by cash registers; subtitles/closed captioning, and invisible text—revealing themselves only to those willing to work for the stories they steward. Presenting work and teaching under Snack Witch is a method of actualizing dreams: A way of building safer realities where people of different political, cultural, and socio-economic backgrounds can share stories and provide mutual aid over food-covered tables.

🔮 Snack Witch Joni Cheung 🍡 is a grateful, uninvited guest born—and knows they want to die—on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh, Stóō, and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh peoples. They are a Hong Kong-Chinese (台山/寶安/廣東 Toisan/Bao'an/Guangdong ancestry) queer, neurodivergent, allophone woman living with chronic illnesses, a second generation immigrant, low income, and working class. They are a Certified Sculpture Witch with an MFA from Concordia University (2023) and hold a BFA with Distinction in Visual Art (2018) from the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University. As a wicked #magicalgirl ✨ who eats art and makes snacks, they have exhibited across Turtle Island and beyond. They love teaching as a sessional professor, albeit under precarious working conditions. Their practice is indebted to the friends, co-conspirators, and peers they've met on the stolen lands of the Kanien’kehá and Mi’kmaq peoples at Concordia and NSCAD University.

A Grant Writing Gremlin, they’ve received numerous awards, including the Individual Arts Grants—Visual Artists: British Columbia Arts Council; Research and Creation Grant: Canada Council for the Arts; and the Dale and Nick Tedeschi Studio Arts Fellowship: Concordia University. They were waitlisted for the SSHRC - Joseph-Armand Bombardier: Canada Graduate Master’s Scholarship. They give back to their communities as an assessor on grant and programming committees for arts councils, galleries, and artist-run-centres.