2033 Essex Rd
Exhibition by Snack Witch Joni Cheung 張文懿
OPENING DATE : SEPTEMBER 5 2025 5-9 PM
EXHIBITION RUN: SEPTEMBER 5 – OCTOBER 24 2025
Artist Statement and Bio:
Through an interdisciplinary artistic practice, I investigate the interdependent relationship between objects, place, and identity. As a Canadian-born Hong Kong-Chinese queer, anglophone woman, I use this lens to navigate discourses of transnationalism, migration, displacement, and diasporas.
Growing up tirelessly grasping at my language ∴ culture, I soothed my hunger for connection via online communication/sharing platforms and by eating. These ingredients helped a hopeful pessimist calm rolling waves of loneliness and learn about their heritage and ancestry. Sifting through family memories of displacement—usually in-between conversations held over food-covered tables—and prickly experiences of trying to blend in until smooth, nourish points of interest to reflect and respond to global contexts and (hi)stories.
Conducting research is a ritual that molds the way I work. Chewing on the spectrum of transparency ↔ opacity and translation of forms (physical ↔ digital) and stories, I collect and layer still and moving images from archives and contemporary media, words, sound(scapes), objects, and places. This research simmers into installations conjured up with sculptures, performances, texts, audio explorations, photographs, and videos—marinating and transforming accumulated ephemera often overlooked by those outside of my communities. As of late, I have been using food and humour to draw people in with the familiar, to confront the uncomfortable histories embedded in the everyday.
🍵🌶️🥭🍲🥟🥘🍦🍰🍍
🔮 Snack Witch Joni Cheung 🍡 is a grateful, uninvited guest born—and knows she wants to die—on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh, Stó:lō, and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh peoples. They are a Certified Sculpture Witch with an MFA from Concordia University (2023). She holds 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, she has exhibited, off- and online, across Turtle Island and beyond. Currently, they are based on the stolen lands of the Kanien’kehá:ka and Mi’kmaq peoples, working under precarious conditions as a sessional professor at Concordia University and NSCAD University.
They have received support from various funding bodies, including the British Columbia Arts Council; Canada Council for the Arts; and Concordia University.
Aside from art-making, Joni likes wandering down grocery store aisles and drinking bubble tea. 🧋
Exhibition Statement:
Snack Witch’s exhibition, 2033 Essex Rd, is a conjuring of sculptures, videos, and participatory works inspired by everyday interactions with family, friends, and those they have yet to meet.
In grocery stores, restaurants, small apartments, and virtual kitchens, Snack Witch often finds themselves reflecting on the intimate relationships and complicated histories embedded within objects used to care for those that surround her: people, ancestors, and the more-than-human.
How do the ways we intersect paths with others—across, around, and between various timescales and spaces—reflect the things we value as individuals and as members of various communities?
What are the types of labour historically performed by Chinese-Canadian communities and how has this work changed through time?
How does the history of migration and Canadian labour/immigration policies shape perspectives and understandings around ideas of migrants and the act of displacement, especially on stolen Indigenous land?
This gathering of works is an offering to those who feel lost and overwhelmed in our current realities. Together, they hope you will dream with her about the ways small acts of care can become rituals of refusal and remembrance: actions that honour slowing down; making space to sit with and converse with past, present, and future; a place to reenact knowledge passed down or forgotten…
About aceartinc.: We are an artist-run centre dedicated to the support, exhibition, and dissemination of contemporary art. aceartinc. Presents five major exhibitions a year by contemporary visual artists. www.aceart.org
We are on Treaty 1 Territory. On the original lands of Anishinaabeg, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota, and Dene Peoples, and the National Homeland of the Red River Métis. We offer our respect and gratitude to the caretakers of this land.
