Snack Witch Joni Cheung
Montreal, CanadaBiography
Joni Cheung, aka Snack Witch, is an MFA candidate in Sculpture and Ceramics at Concordia University and holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts with Distinction in Visual Art (2018) from the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University.
She has exhibited, and curated shows at the CRES Media Arts Committee, Vancouver; the FOFA Gallery, Montreal, Centre A: the Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art; the Audain Gallery, Vancouver; and has been featured in CBC Arts; and the Canada Line Transit BC Public Art Program, among other spaces and platforms. She has received numerous awards, including the British Columbia Arts Council Scholarship and the Dale and Nick Tedeschi Studio Arts Fellowship. She was waitlisted for the SSHRC – Joseph-Armand Bombardier: Canada Graduate Master’s Scholarship (2020).
Snack Witch is a Canadian-born Hong Kong-Chinese artist investigating the interdependent relationship between objects, place and identity through an interdisciplinary research-based practice. She uses her lens as a woman of colour to navigate transnationalism, migration, and diasporas.
About the artwork
Bring back as souvenirs | Give away back home as souvenirs (2019 – Ongoing)
Bring back as souvenirs | Give away back home as souvenirs (2019 – Ongoing) came from the artist’s interest in the “good morning towel,” a banal object she first saw at Chinese restaurants and Hong Kong-style cafes. Seeing it as a non-functional display at the Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile (Hong Kong) shifted her relationship with the object. She became curious about the towel’s origins.
Snack Witch turned to Facebook groups and personal blogs to pick out phrases that depicted how people interacted with these towels. She selected four phrases that vividly described these interactions and screen-printed them onto 40 towels. In this iteration of the artwork, the towels were hand washed and hung on clothing lines to dry.
Photo : Camille Dubuc