Solo Exhibition
FACES OF INTELLIGENCE:
PLAYING WITH AI
5-21 May 2023
This exhibition explores the limits and potential of AI art through a series of experiments in visual and textual creativity using AI generative software. Results of the experiments demonstrate the banality of AI-generated creativity and how the possibility for innovation is less dependent on technological advances than on technology’s interaction with human agency.
Location: AIRspace Projects, Marrickville, NSW.
Writer’s Residency
varuna house
23-30 January 2023
During this one-week alumni residency I focused on writing and revising a poetry collection based on my childhood experience.
Online Exhibition
AI REDACTED
October - December 2021
As one of eight writers/artists selected for the 2021 Firstdraft Soft Power project, I created AI Redacted, an experiment in erasure poetry which continues a tradition of creating of ‘found’ poetry through erasing a large portion of an existing text, in this case a 1986 technical report from New York University titled The Limits of Artificial Intelligence by Jacob T Schwartz.
Erasure is a subtractive and transgressive process, but also an additive and collaborative one. The transformation of a technical report into a poetic form is both disruptive and playful, an invitation to craft new meanings from old text. Pages of the report are reimagined as a palimpsest of scientific ideas turned provocative; the text floats on top of a layer of AI-generated images, hinting at an unanticipated, if not dystopian, future.
Location: https://firstdraft.org.au/soft-power-pages/ai-redacted-janet-bi-li-chan
Solo Exhibition
WEAVING selves
4 - 20 June 2021
Weaving Selves presents a series of new inter-media work based on excavations into my personal history. Weaving is an act of making judgements about revelation and concealment. Weaving is also about fabricating, creating, spinning stories. It is a way of both consolidating and dismantling memories/actions.
What happens when you criss-cross your past with your present? Do you invent a new future? Do you see with new eyes? Do you make sense of contradictions? Are you revealing or covering the pain, the glory, the hopes and the dreams?
Reconstructing my selves through poetry and woven shapes makes tangible the contradictory forces that shape my always tentative steps through life. Reconciling these forces helps me confront the realness of the underlying fragility and the illusion of gathering strength through indebtedness, struggle, adaptation, and achievement. Laying bare this matrix of tension is the beginning of finding the conditions of healing.
Location: AIRspace Projects, Marrickville, NSW.
Science Exhibition
i am ai
2022 (tentative, 2021 exhibition cancelled due to COVID)
This is a travelling exhibition by Imaginary which will be opened in HeidelberG, Germany. It will feature 14 exhibits around three pillars: scientific concepts of AI, AI in creative and artistic endeavours and societal consequences of AI. I have been working with Imaginary to create an exhibit on predictive policing.
Art Residency
Bundanon Trust
18-25 January 2021
This short period of residency presented an opportunity for me to experiment with a new technique for making images (cyanotype) and write new poetry which will feature in the June 2021 exhibition Woven Selves.
Solo exhibition
280,000 Steps: On the road from Robe to Ballarat
3-19 July 2020
280,000 Steps reflects my current interest in exploring issues of justice, truth and reconciliation in Australia. Over ten days I retraced the first and last 100km of the path walked by Chinese miners in the 1850s who made the difficult journey from Robe to Ballarat to resist a discriminatory law that imposed a heavy tax on Chinese entering Victoria. I made images and poetry that respond to the physical and emotional textures of the places I went through. Location: AIRspace Projects, Marrickville, NSW.
Art Residency
santa fe art institute
October 2018 and September 2019
This project was originally to be a collaboration between me and an Australian Indigenous research on Truth and Reconciliation, focusing on Aboriginal deaths in police custody. When my collaborator was not able to join me, I used the opportunity to explore the reconciliation of freedom and constraints in my personal history and inter-generational connections. See my blog The Paradox of Creativity.
Art Residency
sea foundation, Tilburg
2-17 October 2017
This project was inspired by various efforts by civil society organizations to mobilize data to expose harms and injustices and garner support for resistance.
The UNHCR has collected data on the level of population displacement over the years. Its website notes that currently ‘an unprecedented 65.3 million people around the world have been forced from home. Among them are nearly 21.3 million refugees, over half of whom are under the age of 18’ (http://www.unhcr.org/en-au/figures-at-a-glance.html). The politics of immigration has led to various governments taking a hard line on accepting refugees into their countries, instead of seeking a rational, humanitarian solution to the crisis.
I am aware that the use of art to gain empathy or advance justice is fraught with problems. Visual images of the desperation of refugees, even the death of a toddler, may well be instances of ‘crude empathy’ (Brecht) or an exploitative ‘aestheticization of tragedy’ (Carrabine). The use of data visualization has more affinity to science than to art—while it projects rationality, it is also detached from the visceral and emotional images of suffering. This is a risky strategy, as the experience with climate change has shown that mountains of scientific evidence supporting man-made global warming have not changed the mind of sceptics, nor have they moved many governments to take urgent actions. The specific piece I would like to work on will experiment with the use of sound together with data visualization (without visual images of people) to investigate the affective possibilities of such combinations. The residency culminated in a lecture-performance Mapping Crises–Visualising Hope.
Group Exhibition
The clouds in rapids: transformation from knowledge to bits
19 May to 19 June 2017
This exhibition by the SEA Foundation sheds light on the continuous transformation our society is undergoing in terms of technology and data. The abundance of new developments is unstoppable. It’s not the question anymore ‘if’ we participate, but rather how. Whether it’s the rise of social media and the sharing economy, or working from a cloud environment with a smart device. All aspects of live are becoming increasingly connected, but at what price? Each development poses new questions, that force us to reapproach existing moral and legal views. My work My Data My Self was part of the exhibition. Other artists include Simon Denny (NZ), Jonas Lund (Sweden), Junsheng Zhou (China), Damon Zucconi (US), and SanJun Yoo (Korea).
Group Exhibition
triplicated
9 July to 17 July 2010
Chalk Horse presents an exploratory exhibition on the nexus of art and law. Tim Gregory, Janet Chan, and Oliver Watts all lecture, study and research, in one way or another at the University of New South Wales. On realising their shared interest in visual culture and the law they decided to mount this exhibition. As part of this collegiate spirit Gregory and Watts will reprise their role as co-lecturers to expand on the exhibition at the opening through a lecture/performance/opening statement. My work Mounting Evidence was part of this exhibition.
Solo Exhibition
mounting evidence: traces of things to come
28 July to 1 August 2008
This exhibition marked my graduation from the MFA program at the College of Fine Arts, UNSW. Some of the work can be seen here.
Publication
I am, we are…
This image was published in Law Text Culture, volume 10, special issue on ‘The trouble with pictures’ (2006)
Group Exhibition
small wonders
17 November to 4 December 2005
This exhibition was at the Delmar Gallery. My work Fingerprint #1 was shown.
Group Exhibition
imaging the object
22 October to 7 November 2004
This exhibition was at the Delmar Gallery. My digital paintings Through a Scanner’s Eye were shown.
Group Exhibition
dissonance
18-30 August 2003
This exhibition was at the Kudos Gallery. My digital painting Body Scan was shown.
Group Exhibition
series
7-11 July 2003
This exhibition was at the COFA Exhibition/Performance Space. My Duratran prints Through a Scanner’s Eye were shown.
Sole Exhibition
through a glass Darkly
23-25 May 2003
This exhibition was at Green College, University of British Columbia. A series of my work on Duratrans were shown as part of the conference The New Politics of Surveillance and Visibility.
Group Exhibition
exploration
October 2002
This exhibition was at the CoFA Exhibition/Performance Space. My paintings Borders of the Risk Society were shown.
Publication
BORDERS OF THE RISK SOCIETY
One of my images in this series was published in City State: Flow/Capture/Control/Rupture: A Critical Reader on Surveillance and Control, UTS Community Law and Legal Centre, Sydney in 2002.