Artist Name: Catherine Chen
Residency Dates: March – May 2026
Born: 1997
Hometown: New York
Lives & Works: Manhattan, NY
Education:
2025 – MFA in Painting / Printmaking, Virginia Commonwealth University
2017 – B.A. in Economics with General Honors, University of Chicago
Bio/Statement:
Catherine Chen is one of the selected artists for the 2026 NYC-Based Artist Residency Program.
In her practice, Catherine explores the enactive dominance of digital platforms made by corporations and the ways in which they gamify everyday life. Through installation, image-making, and performance, she maps the physical accumulation of labor that renders their power possible and then exercises it–through inanimate, material manifestations that control the behaviors of encounter.
Currently, she is producing a body of work that reveals what it’s like to work inside a large U.S. bank. With a poetic sense of factuality, she outlines the histrionic mismatch between the volume of bodies, bureaucracy, and manual coordination required for outcomes that seem both insignificant and inconsequential. As a narrative from the bowels of the bank, the work invites itself to be consumed as content. As a sculptural form that transforms encounters of consumption to shadow that of its production, it activates the fundamental trick of platforms and emphasizes the falsehood of their neutrality.
Through such paired exercises of embodying and enacting the platform, what she points towards is the nature of a participation that is far from binary and much too close to totality.
Catherine Chen lives and works in New York, New York. She has exhibited and performed at the ICA at VCU (2025), and shown with Immaterial Projects (2025), and A.I.R. Gallery (2021). She has participated in a residency at ACRE (2025) and was awarded an IFPDA Blackburn Scholarship at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (2022). She received an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and a B.A. from The University of Chicago.
The 2026 NYC-Based Artist Residency Program is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
