Casey Wei wins the 8th Philip B. Lind Emerging Artist Prize at The Polygon Gallery
The country’s largest accolade for emerging visual artists comes with a $25,000 cash prize
THE POLYGON GALLERY has announced that Casey Wei is the winner of this year’s Philip B. Lind Emerging Artist Prize, the country’s largest accolade for emerging visual artists.
The winner was revealed in an awards ceremony on January 23 at the gallery with members of the Lind family in attendance. The recently revamped biennial award comes with a $25,000 prize and the opportunity to produce a project with The Polygon.
The other participating artists featured in the Lind Biennial Exhibition include Mena El Shazly, Karice Mitchell, Dion Smith-Dokkie, and Parumveer Walia.
The jury consisted of Grace Deveney from the Art Institute of Chicago, acclaimed contemporary artist Brian Jungen, and the Hammer Museum’s interim chief curator Aram Moshayedi.
Wei’s interdisciplinary practice in filmmaking, writing, and performance is informed by activities such as editing, publishing, and programming. Among her recent works are the book Tuning to Oblivion: an artist residency (M:ST Performative Art, 2023) and the album Stimuloso (Mint Records, 2022) with her band, Kamikaze Nurse. Since 2015, Wei has been programming (and sometimes playing) in her concert series, art rock?. She is currently pursuing her PhD in contemporary arts at Simon Fraser University. Wei is also the co-founder and editor of ReIssue magazine and is the Short Forum Programmer at Vancouver International Film Festival.
“My practice is discursive, ephemeral, and social—I seek to engage my peers to build the community in which I want to make work,” Wei said in a statement. “The overarching intention behind my projects is to create a history that prioritizes everyday life as the site of transformation—artistically, socially, politically. Materially, it often manifests in projects where I act as director, work with numerous collaborators, and result in various documents to be disseminated thereafter. I often use multimedia and multi-narrative strategies of representation, as much of my work is event-based, collaborative, and iterative. One project can have many components: a book, a performance, a video, a concert—or be shown in different contexts: a single-channel film in a cinema; an installation in a gallery; online for posterity.”
In an interview earlier this year with Stir, Wei described her work in the exhibition called The Zhang Clan 张家族. “The Zhang Clan is an installation work with an experimental documentary at its core,” Wei said. “The premise is my maternal family, the Zhangs, who have all—with the exception of my mom—immigrated to Melbourne, Australia. (She’s here with my dad and I.) Under the conceit of a post-Tiananmen migration story, this project enacts methods of representation to address what cannot be verbally communicated, for a number of reasons: privacy, language gaps, lived trauma.”
The Lind Prize was established in 2015 with a donation from Rogers Communications in honour of Phil Lind’s 40-year commitment to the communications industry. Lind was a giant in the arts and education community for his philanthropic endeavours and an avid art collector with a particular fondness for contemporary photography and B.C. artists. He died on August 20, 2023, his 80th birthday. Last year, the Lind family ensured the future of the Lind Prize, which is awarded biannually to an emerging B.C.–based artist working across the mediums of film, photography, or video, with a legacy donation in Lind’s honour. Artists are nominated by staff and faculty from established arts institutions, organizations, and post-secondary programs from across the province. The award is juried by an international panel of artists and curators.
Previous Lind Prize winners are Simranpreet Anand (2023), Charlotte Zhang (2021), Laura Gildner (2020), Jessica Johnson (2019), Christopher Lacroix (2018), Marisa Kriangwiwat Holmes (2017), and Vilhelm Sundin (2016).
The Lind Biennial is on view at The Polygon Gallery until February 2.