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Information
The Wet Commune
Green Sun
Pattern Test (No. 1)
Chlorophyll Grid
Fluid Dynamics Study
Britannia
Stay With Your Tribe
Sun and 80 Consonents
Matadero
CUERPO Collective Body
Supernormal Vision Machine
Night Stories
Terra
Field Condition
Untitled



   Sy Di 2026

I am a Chinese Canadian artist currently based in Toronto and Vancouver. My work explores the materiality of post-natural landscapes, particularly post-extractive sites, toxic substances, and forms of biopolitics mediated through fluid matter. I am interested in mist as an atmospheric medium that moves across human and non-human thresholds, producing shared conditions of affect, intimacy, danger, and uncertainty. I also work with bodily fluids such as saliva, where abjective expeirence and biological trace become entangled with systems of governance and control. Across these research interests, I seek to unpack moments of tension where substances produce relational, ambient, and speculative environments.

In my installation work, I often use repurposed objects, biological media, plants, electronics, environmental data, and live coding tools to assemble multimedia environments. My thinking is informed by scientific and cosmo-spiritual traditions that bridge natural systems, technology, and Eastern philosophy, as well as environmental history and cybernetics.

sy.di [at] mail.utoronto.ca

15.Untitled



2005




beeswax sheets

Untitled is a diptych rendered as traces on thin sheets of white beeswax bloom. One panel depicts the portrait of a woman constructed from short lines and dots, reproduced from the reverse of the 2011 Canadian one-hundred-dollar banknote commemorating Canadian medical innovation and the discovery of insulin. The second panel reproduces excerpts from a 2012 statement by Mark Carney, then Governor of the Bank of Canada, responding to the controversy surrounding the redesign of the banknote's scientist figure after concerns were raised about the ethnicity of an earlier representation. 

The work examines the relationship between representation, circulated images, and the symbolic authority of the state. Both the portrait and the institutional text derive from a medium designed for mass circulation, where images become vehicles through which national identity and cultural belonging are constructed and contested.

The image and text are inscribed into the delicate surface of beeswax bloom—a thin white film that naturally forms on wax and can be easily disturbed, erased, or altered through touch and fluctuations in temperature. Neither image nor text is permanently fixed. As the surface shifts over time, the traces gradually soften and fade.

The material instability of the work mirrors the instability of the narratives it references. Rather than treating money as a stable instrument of value or representation, the work foregrounds currency as a fragile cultural artifact through which questions of circulation, state power, and visibility are continuously negotiated.


1/4    Tracing of female researcher portrait on the reverse of 2011 Canadian $100 polymer banknote
2/4    Original text from a 2012 statement issued by Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney in response to the image controversy surrounding the researcher depicted on the Canadian $100 polymer banknote
3/4    Installation view
4/4    Reverse of the 2011 Canadian $100 polymer banknote, featuring a researcher at a microscope alongside an insulin bottle commemorating the discovery of insulin