Curator-in-Residence

2025/26 Yan Zhou

"As a Chinese diaspora who has lived in Canada for 16 years, I have dreamed, lost, and searched between climates, homes, languages, and cultures. I grew up and lived in the ancient capital city of Xi’an in Northwestern China for 39 years, deeply shaped by the people, language, and cultures of my homeland. As a curator and scholar, my work has focused on cross-cultural art communication between Asia and Canada."

"Recently, I have become more devoted to socially engaged art and art activism, diaspora cultures, community building, collective healing, and social and environmental justice. For me, curating is essentially a practice of nurturing mutual care and growth, resisting the violence of patriarchal culture and all abusive powers, and breaking down hierarchies."

"My ongoing work addresses topics such as diaspora and climates, retreat from the neoliberal urbanism art, mental health, and collective healing. I wrote a book on plant transmission and cultural exchange between China and the West from the 16^th century to the early 19^th century. I have been patiently researching plants, contemporary art, and activist gardening."

"Beyond my scholarly and curatorial work, I write and translate poetry. I dare to be a warrior-critic of culture, art, literature, and politics. I am the mother of a lovely daughter, and a good cook who occasionally fails in the art of cooking."

"I am a dispersed seed, a wild grass that claims no authority or status. I embrace and sing to the world as a rebelling poet. I embrace you—and everyone and every being—as a friend, feminist, and activist."

Diaspora Climate, curated by Yan Zhou, February 12 - March 5, 2026, artLAB Gallery, Western University

Western News: Meet Western's inaugural curator-in-residence, Yan Zhou

Current Events

Past Events

"Climate Diaspora: Refugees and Refuges"
Thursday, December 4 | 11:30am - 1:00pm
Room: VAC 247
John Labatt Visual Arts Centre, Western University

In a world of growing refugees and shrinking refuges, how might we form cross-national, cross-cultural, and cross-species relations for environmental solidarity? Join us to engage in these questions through:

• Wan Qing. Open Your Mouth When The Meal Come. Film. 2022.
  
  
• Aaron Ambroso. Climate Migration: Displacement, Travel, Home(2023-4). Exhibition. The Houston Climate Justice Museum.
  
  
• Write and draw your postcards for the Ecological Post Office for Climate Justice program. The Houston Climate Justice Museum & Diaspora Climate.

Climate Diaspora: Refugees and Refuges

We live in a world of growing refugees and shrinking refuges. As humans and species are increasingly displaced, spaces for rejuvination and regeneration are also shrinking. This event tracks various kinds of movements within these patchwork spaces, from pipelines to seeds to water, through which we might reimagine our worlds. It prompts us to ask: How might we form cross-national, cross-cultural, and cross-species relations for environmental solidarity? 

Join us to explore these themes through Wan Qing's short film  "Open Your Mouth When The Meal Come," and the exhibit project Climate Migration: Displacement, Travel, Home (2023-4), organized by the Houston Climate Justice Museum. Participate in the Ecological Post Office for Climate Justice program, writing and drawing your postcard using a template specially designed and made by the Houston Climate Justice Museum, in collaboration with Diaspora Climate.

Open Your Mouth When the Meal Come (2022). Film. Duration: 11’42’’.
Restless in the abstraction and mystery of modern life, we hold chopsticks in one hand and the Internet in the other, through these mediums, the mouth chews the substance, the eyes absorb the knowledge and entertainment, the body fights inside, the brain and stomach compete for digestive energy, and we feel exhausted by the end of a meal... The bodies of food do not come from around, their souls want home — What we eat is not a meal, but information. 

Wan Qing (b. 1993, Chongqing) has worked in Guangzhou since 2011. Her recent art practice focuses on interactions with the environment, subjects, and flows of energy. Wan is also a member of Yi Qi Lian Gong (Energy Waving Collective) and Theatre 44, an initiator of limilink, a caretaker of Qiantai osf, and a practitioner of Five Element Acupuncture. Life, creation, and collective practice continuously shape her art and activism practice.

Climate Migrations exhibition is a public art and public history project around the subject of climate change fueled migration, designed to connect artists, scholars, activists, and communities to explore/interrogate/imagine/expose the connection between climate change and displacement, travel, and making new homes.

The Houston Climate Justice Museum focuses on the communities most impacted by a warming planet and tells stories to create opportunities for more equal well-being within a world of environmental catastrophe. Houston Climate Justice Museum promotes climate and environmental justice to rethink museums at every level. The museum is a platform for marginalized voices, and in solidarity with climate survivors, Indigenous land rights and Land Back movements, resisting the capitalist culture of extraction, and practicing sustainability.

Also, in collaboration with the Houston Climate Justice Museum & Diaspora Climate, we invite you to write and draw your postcards for the Ecological Post Office for Climate Justice program. You can find a printed copy in the event, or download a copy from the link: https://www.climatejusticemuseum.org/ecological-post-office

Climate Diaspora: Refugees and Refuges event is part of “Diaspora Climate” organized by Yan Zhou, Curator-in-Residence in the Department of Visual Arts. In this project, we explore the ecology of the diverse cultures and histories of diaspora communities, foregrounding their role as caretakers and warriors, upholding justice and solidarity with both local and home countries in their shared struggles against environmental, social, and political injustice wherever they live and prosper.

Interactive. Write and draw your postcards for the Ecological Post Office for Climate Justice program. The Houston Climate Justice Museum & Diaspora Climate.

We invite attendees and others to participate in the Ecological Post Office for Climate Justice postcard-creating and sharing initiative, a joint project of the Houston Climate Justice Museum and the Diaspora Climate curator-in-residence program. Attendees may pick up printed postcards and write or draw their own at the event site, or they may download and print postcards to create their messages. Please send your postcards to us; we will display them in various formats at next year’s Diaspora Climate exhibition and at the Houston Climate Justice Museum.

https://www.climatejusticemuseum.org/ecological-post-office

You can send your postcard to:
Yan Zhou
Diaspora Climate—Curator-in-residence
Department of Visual Arts
John Labatt Visual Arts Centre
London, Ontario, Canada, N6A 5B7 

Or: 

Ecological Post Office for Climate Justice
Houston Climate Justice Museum
3308 Garrow St.
Houston, TX, USA. 77003

https://www.climatejusticemuseum.org/ecological-post-office

Support by: Alena Robin, Eeva Siivonen, Liza Eurich, Cindi Talbot, Dickson Bou, and others.
Logo Design: Lilin
Poster design: Stefania Andreea Dragalin 

"Mid-Autumn (Moon) Festival"
Wednesday, September 17th | 4:00pm - 6:30pm
Digital Creativity Lab (VAC 137)
John Labatt Visual Arts Centre, Western University

This event is part of “Diaspora Climate” organized by Yan Zhou, Curator-in-Residence in Social and Environmental Justice in the Arts at the Department of Visual Arts.

In this residency project, we explore the ecology of the diverse cultures and histories of diaspora communities, foregrounding their role as caretakers and warriors, upholding justice and solidarity with both local and home countries in their shared struggles against environmental, social, and political injustice wherever they live and prosper.

As part of the community engagement components, the “Diaspora Kitchen” program organizes events that bring together local and international communities to share food, stories, memories, and works. In the first “Diaspora Kitchen” event, we will celebrate the Mid-Autumn (Moon) Festival.

The event will include three activities:

1: Mia Ouyang, a mathematician and visiting scholar at Western University, will lead the mooncake sharing and moon cake dice game (The Moon Festival Bóbǐng Game). This local tradition is connected to the complex history of Taiwan and mainland China, as well as to the ancient Chinese civil service examination system.

2: Andy Patton, a painter and a poet, who is an alumnus of Visual Arts at Western, will read the poem “Spring River in the Flower Moon Night” by Tang Dynasty poet Zhang Ruoxu. Andy said this poem is “the one poem I would save from the universal wreckage if all of China’s great poetry was being destroyed.”

3: We will screen a short film, titled “Qingbuliang & Tabbouleh” (تشينج بو ليانج & تبولة).: In the film, displaced Syrian children and their families in the Bekaa Valley, Lebanon and migrant workers’ children in Haikou City, Hainan Island, China, met online and shared their favorite food: the Hainan Island fruit bowl “qingbuliang” and the Middle Eastern salad “tabbouleh”, during the 4th Children’s Art Festival of Kindergarten Without Walls in Haikou, China in August 2025. During the screening, we will also share “Qingbuliang & Tabbouleh”. 

View images from the event here.