JESS X CHEN is a film director, artist, and nationally touring poet. After the Cultural Revolution, her parents immigrated from Nanchang, China to Canada in the late 1980s. Her work exposes narratives of colonial trauma, diaspora, and collective protest by connecting the violences between the queer and colored body and the body of the Earth. She is a member of the Justseeds Artists Co-operative and a facilitator of Artists Against Police Violence. Her poetry is published in Nepantla: A Journal For Queer Poets of Color and Margins, a Journal of the Asian American Writers Workshop. She has lectured and performed her talks “Migration: The Radical Imagination” and “Yellow/Black/Brown: on Colony Collapse and Eco-Feminism” at TEDx, and Netroots Nation as well as nationally. She is currently developing a feature film on the Navajo Nation, where she is teaching art and poetry workshops to the Diné youth community.
Statement on Visual and Language Art
The migrant justice movement is a living community that breathes, soars, and imagines together. More than a hundred different species and colors of birds have been migrating from Central America across the Sonoran desert and back for thousands of years. Similar to these birds, the immigration of people of color is driven by the radical imagination of a future free of borders, incarceration, and white-supremacy. Migrants and refugees risk enormous loss in the optimism of securing family and community in a new country. The migrants depicted in these paintings ceaselessly reach for their families and form constellations in the sky despite the borders, detainments, and abuse of the US. These images are a tribute to their undefeatable optimism and resilience.
Art in this collection has been featured in spaces such as Culture Strike’s migrant justice campaigns: Visions From The Inside; Until We All Are Free, the UN Human Rights Council, The Huffington Post; and the Immigration Exhibit at the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian American Experience. Two of these images included in this feature were commissioned by Culture Strike.
