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Wednesday 11am - 6pm Thursday 11am - 6pm Friday 11am - 6pm Saturday 11am - 6pm Sunday 1pm - 5pm

CICA Vancouver, 228 Abbott Street, Vancouver, BC (2026)

09/01/2026

In Zoe Winters' do you see me, softened colour and atmosphere bring an imagined presence into a space between landscape, memory, and quiet recognition. Winters creates contemplative worlds where mountains, light, and gentle figures merge. Her paintings ask what it means to feel accompanied, and how an image can offer refuge without closing off curiosity. See the work in First Light at CICA Vancouver.⁠
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p1. Do You See Me; Oil on Canvas; 36 x 36 in;⁠
p.2. Do You See Me (detail)⁠
p3. Yama Yama; Oil on Canvas; 36 x 56 in;⁠
p4. The Island; Oil on Canvas; 34 x 48 in;⁠
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Zoë Winters is a Vancouver-based American artist primarily working in painting and drawing, with additional practices in ceramics and animation. Raised in the Pacific Northwest, Winters developed an early sensitivity to atmosphere through the region’s mountains, forests, and coastal light, alongside formative exposure to video games and animated imagery. These influences continue to inform her creation of contemplative worlds inhabited by gentle, imagined presences. Winters received a BFA in Drawing and Painting from the University of Washington, with a minor in Japanese Language and Culture. Influenced by Japanese aesthetics and Shinto thought, her work explores softened forms, compressed value relationships, and delicately layered color through an intuitive and meditative approach to image-making. Rooted in rigorous drawing training, her practice often centers on emotional atmosphere, memory, and the quiet emotional presence of imagined characters within natural environments.

08/31/2026

A structure can support us and still feel unstable.
Xinhang Wei's ... It feels like the fishbone trying
to stand vertically uses processed fish bones and fabric to make the hidden frameworks of language, memory, and identity materially present. Working across installation, performance, sculpture, and sound, Wei considers migration and translation as embodied processes. The work holds a moment where meaning is not fixed, but negotiated. See it in First Light at CICA Vancouver.

p1. ...It feels like the fishbone trying to stand vertically; processed fish bones, fabric; 180 cm x 140 cm x 5 cm;

I see language as the bone of a culture - a structure that supports how we perceive, remember, and inhabit the world. My practice explores migration, code-switching, and language as embodied and structural processes. Through repetitive acts of tuning, sorting, stitching, and arranging, these materials become metaphors for the hidden frameworks that support language, memory, and identity. Drawing from my experience of moving between different places, I approach migration not only as geographical movement but as a continual process of linguistic reorientation. Rather than seeking clear translation, my work inhabits spaces of unreadability and suspension, inviting viewers to consider language as something we continually negotiate and carry through the body.

Xinhang (Elsa) Wei is an artist from Xiamen, China, currently based between London and Vancouver. She is completing an MFA in Arts & Humanities at the Royal College of Art (2026) after receiving a BFA in Visual Art from the University of British Columbia (2025). Rooted in Hokkien culture and maritime traditions, her multidisciplinary practice includes installation, performance, sculpture, and sound. Drawing from her experiences of living between China, Singapore, Canada, and the United Kingdom, her work explores migration, language, and cultural translation. She is interested in how artistic practice can make processes of linguistic and cultural negotiation materially perceptible.

08/30/2026

A garden can be a place to tend, rebuild, and become.

Jordan Richert's Watering My Garden draws on tattooing, body modification, and the ways people reclaim agency over the body after it has been made vulnerable. Through digital illustration, Richert connects the human form with the natural world, allowing growth and self-revision to take visual shape. The work is on view in First Light at CICA Vancouver.

p1. Watering My Garden; Giclee print on archival paper, digital illustration; 22 x 22 in;

“Watering My Garden” was visually and thematically shaped by my exploration of tattooing as an artistic medium. In researching the historical context of body modification, especially as a form of personal agency and cultural defiance for women, I was particularly moved by accounts of individuals who have used it to reclaim boundaries and form new versions of the self after experiences of lost autonomy. This sits alongside the broader narrative in my work of the
interconnectedness of the human form and the natural world, where bodies and organic matter are two interwoven systems constantly shaping each other. My research and resulting work is a way of metabolizing my experience of sexual assault. I wanted to externalise the idea that difficult experiences don’t sit neatly in the past. In many ways time is a circle and trauma resurfaces constantly and absorbs into how you move through a post-traumatised life. The core of this work is about ownership. These feelings, even if they are grief or pain or anger, are entirely mine to reveal or conceal. Instead of repressing them or separating myself, I am exploring the possibility of transformation and integration that comes with releasing them. The grief and loss of control become something that feeds back into my creative agency.

Jordan Richert is a southern-born, Vancouver-based illustrator, designer, and artist. Working primarily in digital illustration, Jordan’s work is informed by their experience as a trans artist, exploring the interconnectedness and blurred boundaries between the human form and the natural world. Their work often reflects on the mutability of the body and the ways people reshape themselves. Jordan's work has been featured by SAD Magazine, the Association of Registered Graphic Designers, the World Illustration Awards, the Beaumont Studios, and Slice of Life Gallery.

08/30/2026

There is a particular kind of quiet in a Vancouver sunset.

Lydia Chen's Kitsilano Sunset, Series 3 holds that brief shift of colour and light, when the familiar coastline becomes newly present. Chen paints as a way to pause, appreciate, and reconnect with the world around her. The work does not rush past the everyday; it gives an ordinary view the time it needs to become luminous. See the work in First Light at CICA Vancouver.

p1. Kitsilano Sunset, Series 3; Acrylic on Paper; 8 x 10 in;
p2. Kitsilano Sunset, Series 5; Acrylic on Paper; 8 x 10 in;

My work is primarily inspired by the landscapes of British Columbia, with Vancouver’s sunsets at the heart of my practice. Time seems to stand still when the sky transforms with color and light, creating moments that fill me with both wonder and calm. These fleeting scenes have become a source of gratitude and inspiration in my life. Through my paintings, I seek not only to capture their beauty but also the emotions they evoke, the quiet stillness, the warmth, and the sense of connection that nature offers. My Vancouver Sunset Series is an invitation to pause, breathe, and appreciate the simple yet profound beauty that surrounds us every day. Alongside my landscape practice, I occasionally explore the human figure as a way to reflect on body positivity, self-expression, and personal growth. These works are inspired by my own journey toward greater self-acceptance and celebrate individuality over societal expectations. Rather than pursuing an ideal of perfection, I hope they encourage viewers to embrace themselves with honesty, confidence, and compassion.

Lydia Chen is a self-taught emerging artist based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Working primarily in acrylic and watercolor. Having lived in Vancouver for over eight years, Lydia draws continual inspiration from the
region’s mountains, coastline, and vibrant multicultural community. Her landscape paintings capture the quiet beauty of Vancouver’s coastlines, calm waters and colorful sunsets, using vivid yet tranquil palettes to reflect her appreciation for the beauty of everyday life. Her artistic training began at Nanfang Hua Yuan Art Studio in China before continuing to develop her practice independently. Her work has been exhibited in both solo and group exhibitions in British Columbia, including her solo exhibition, Vancouver Sunset Series at Grounds for Coffee, and the Vancouver Outsider Arts Festival Satellite Exhibition. Through her work, Lydia invites viewers to pause, appreciate the beauty around them, and cultivate a deeper connection with both nature and themselves.

08/29/2026

A bird can carry a story without settling it.

In Taaye's Bird of Departure, mineral pigment and silver foil gather on mashi paper to form a figure suspended between movement and stillness. Across Taaye's practice, birds become companions for questions of passage, grief, resilience, and transformation. The work invites a slower kind of looking, one that follows the image beyond its first impression. See Bird of Departure in First Light at CICA Vancouver.

p1. Bird of Departure; Mineral pigment on mashi paper; 21 x 30 in;
p2. Bird of Descending; Mineral pigment and silver foil on mashi paper; 21 x 30 in;
p3. Fluttering of Minds II; Monotype; 18 x 26 in
p4. Fluttering of Minds III; Monotype; 18 x 26 in

Taaye (b. Hong KonTaaye (born in Hong Kong. Based in Vancouver and Hong Kong) is an artist whose practice examines external conditioning and its effect on internal disposition. Working primarily with East Asian mineral pigments (岩絵具 iwaenogu; 岩彩 yán cǎi), she creates works about grief, resilience, and transformation, bridging material knowledge with lived experience. Her imagery draws from Cantonese and Chinese cultural traditions, especially Buddhist and Daoist motifs, alongside folk tales, hybrid bird-like creatures, and imagined landscapes. Through these elements she reconstructs selfhood, inviting viewers to reflect on impermanence, belonging, and the enduring threads that connect past, present, and future. Each work becomes a vessel for questioning what endures, what is carried forward, and what must be newly imagined.

Her practice has been supported by major funding bodies, including the Canada Council for the Arts (2024, 2025, 2026), the BC Arts Council (2025), and the Hong Kong Arts Development Council Emerging Artist Grant (2025). Her engagement with mineral pigments deepened through specialised training at Tunghai University in Taichung, Taiwan, in 2024. She serves on the board of Access Gallery in Vancouver. Her works are held in private collections in Hong Kong, the United States, and Canada. Taaye holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design.

08/29/2026

What do we hold on to when everything around us is changing? ⁠
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Sandy Wen's Things That You Can Hold On To gathers colour, gesture, and the material weight of oil paint into a space for reflection. Wen's practice considers nature, memory, and the emotional textures of living through uncertainty. The painting does not offer a fixed answer. Instead, it gives us a place to stay for a moment, with the things that remain. See the work in First Light at CICA Vancouver.⁠
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p1. Things That You Can Hold On To; Oil on Canvas; 30 x 48 in;⁠
p2. River of Life; Acrylic on Canvas; 36 x 24 in;⁠
p3. What is Gonna Die Stays Forever; Acrylic on Canvas；18 x 24in;⁠
p.4 - p.5. Installation view; image courtesy Andrew Lau

Sandy Wen (b. 1992) received her Bachelor of Interior Design from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, before earning a Master of Design from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in Providence, Rhode Island. Over the past decade, she has cultivated an international practice as both an interior designer and artist, living and working in New York and Vancouver. Her background in architecture and interior design has shaped a keen sensitivity to materiality, objects, light, and spatial composition, with qualities that continue to inform her painting practice. Working primarily in oil, acrylic and watercolor, Wen explores the emotional resonance of memory, domestic objects, and the spaces we inhabit. Her paintings draw from personal recollections and everyday encounters, transforming familiar forms into semi-surreal narratives that blur the boundaries between observation and imagination. Through expressive color, layered textures, and carefully orchestrated compositions, she creates intimate worlds where the ordinary becomes quietly extraordinary. Today, Wen divides her artistic practice between Vancouver and New York.
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#2026

08/28/2026

Some stories are built from what remains. Ketty Haolin Zhang's One chapter at a time brings archival inkjet print, burnt acrylic glass, and the language of the fragment into a work about memory, inheritance, and becoming.

Zhang's practice moves between image, object, and text, allowing personal and cultural histories to surface through layers of material. One chapter at a time is part of First Light at CICA Vancouver, where the online silent auction remains open through October 10.

p1. One chapter at a time; archival inkjet print mounted on ACM, burnt acrylic glass, framed; 16.5 x 12.5 in;

p2. Love march heaven's will; archival inkjet print mounted on ACM, burnt acrylic glass, framed; 16.5 x 12.5 in;

p3. Every love story is a ghost story; used silverware, inkjet on paper, acrylic paint, resin, cosmetic pigment; 6.75 x 10.25 x 2 in;

p4. so dense and alive and real that it seemed indisputable that that was what life was; used silverware, inkjet on paper, acrylic paint, resin, jade stone, beads; 23 x 9.5 x 1.5 in

Ketty Haolin Zhang (b. Chaoyang, Liaoning) is a visual artist based between New York and Vancouver. Informed by her diasporic experience immigrating to Canada from an industrial city in northeast China as a teenager, her work explores provisional belonging, primarily through assemblage and painting. Drawing from personal archives, literature, pop culture, and mythology, she is interested in self-construction and self-transformation as a form of resistance under conditions of instability, and as a symbolic technique to make oneself at home in the world. Zhang's recent work has been featured by Dazed, Impulse Magazine, CBC Arts, Overstandard, and Whitehot Magazine. Recent exhibitions include Capture Photography Festival (2026), The Sue Tear (2026), and White Columns (2025). She has received grants from Canada Council for the Arts (2026), Vancouver Foundation (2026), and BC Arts Council (2025). Zhang holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of British Columbia.

08/28/2026

A painting can be a vessel for distance.

Rin Wanchen Yu's Moon, Take Me From Afar turns the moon into a quiet point of departure, a presence that holds longing, movement, and the possibility of elsewhere. Yu's oil paintings move through memory, landscape, and emotional geography. Their stillness is not a pause from feeling, but a way of giving feeling room to unfold. Moon, Take Me From Afar is on view in First Light at CICA Vancouver.

p1. Moon, Take Me From Afar; Oil on Canvas; 16 x 18 in;
p2. A Thousand Turns; Oil on Canvas; 18 x 24 in;
p3. Wings and Veils; Oil on Canvas; 18 x 12 in;
p4. Wings and Veils II; Oil on Canvas; 18 x 24 in;
p.5 - p.6. Installation view

Yu's paintings explore displacement, loss, nostalgia, and loneliness through the lens of her experiences growing up between China and Taiwan from 2000 to 2020. Living between these two places profoundly shaped her perception of the world, fostering a persistent sense of in-betweenness, unsettling, and alienation. Her work invites viewers to reflect on displacement, isolation, and the fragility and the conflicted nature of a sense of belonging and home. For Yu, painting functions as a process of self-reconciliation. At the same time, her works become a point of intersection between personal experience and the external world, a vessel for emotions, memories, reflections, and inherited silence.

Rin Wanchen Yu is a Taiwanese illustrator, painter, and visual storyteller. Born in Taiwan in 2000 and raised in China, she developed an early interest in drawing and began her art training in secondary school, studying across multiple media at independent art studios. Yu received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Animation from Taipei National University of the Arts in 2023. After graduating, she worked professionally in the animation industry for over two years, contributing to feature films and commercial advertising productions. Her experience
in animation established a strong foundation in visual storytelling, cinematic composition, and sequential image-making, which continues to inform her artistic practice. Seeking a more personal and contemplative approach to visual storytelling, Yu transitioned from animation to painting and illustration. She completed a Master of Fine Arts at Emily Carr University of Art + Design in 2026, where she delved into research on displacement, memory, hybrid identity, and diaspora through autobiographical and narrative illustration.

-CICA Gallery

08/27/2026

Myth is never far from the present.

In Biliana Velkova's The Golden Apples and the Cursed Tree, gouache and gold leaf bring an old story into a luminous, unsettled space. Velkova's images draw on folklore, ritual, and the tension between beauty and danger. The work feels like a fragment from a story we almost remember, asking what continues to echo after the tale has ended. See it in First Light at CICA Vancouver.

p1.Krali Marko and the Water Lamia; Gouache on Arches paper; 22 x 30 in;
p2.The Golden Apples and the Cursed Tree; Gouache on Arches paper; 22 x 30 in;
p3.Kuker; Gouache on Arches paper; 22 x 30 in;
p.4 - p.5. Installation view

Her recent series, The Balkan Weather Tales draws from Bulgarian folklore, reimagining mythological beings once used to explain natural forces like drought, storms, or circadian rhythms. These creatures, once brought to life through song and oral tradition, now resurface in layered, hypnotic drawings that bridge ancient belief systems and contemporary anxieties. In these works, the mystical and the mundane coexist, offering a space where the past haunts the present and the unknown continues to hold power. The series features works on paper, in gouache and gold leaf.

Originally from Sofia, Bulgaria, Biliana Velkova is currently based in Vancouver. Her practice incorporates painting, drawing and performance to explore issues of place, displacement and diaspora. She has an MFA from the University of Saskatchewan and a BFA from Concordia University.

08/27/2026

What happens when a private voice refuses to stay quiet?

Jazmin Sasky's STOP, children at play! brings together photocopy, acrylic, ink, and the charged presence of a body speaking back.⁠ Sasky's practice follows voice through gender, identity, migration, and belief. Her alter ego, Jazmín, carries autobiographical narratives into images that are direct, vulnerable, and unapologetic. The work is on view in First Light at CICA Vancouver.⁠
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p1.⁠ Dinner is ready!; Gouache paint, photocopies, ink on paper; 24 X 18 in;
p2.⁠ STOP, children at play!; Black and white photocopies, acrylic paint, ink on paper; 17 x 11 in;
p3.⁠Who am I?; Gouache paint, photocopies, ink on paper; 25 x 18 in;
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⁠Jazmín Sasky is a multidisciplinary artist working across sketchbooks, photography, video art, and drawings. Her work explores the formation and transformation of voice through themes of gender, identity, migration, and belief. At the center of her practice is Jazmín, the artist’s alter ego, a constructed presence that carries and performs autobiographical narratives. Accompanied by a Snoopy suitcase, Jazmín first emerges in the artist’s sketchbooks, reinterpreting and giving new form to moments drawn from the artist’s life.

Born and raised in Argentina, the artist immigrated to Canada in 2004. She divides her time between Vancouver and Oaxaca. She holds a degree in Graphic Design and Illustration from the UBA- University of Buenos Aires in 1993. Her work has been exhibited in Canada, the United States, and Mexico, and she has participated in international mentorship programs that have informed her current conceptual practice. After a long career in design, and painting, Sasky’s recent work has shifted toward autobiographical and conceptual forms centered on works on paper and photo performance. Across all media, Sasky investigates how voice is constructed, challenged, and ultimately reclaimed.
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CICA Vancouver

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Wednesday	11am - 6pm
Thursday	11am - 6pm
Friday	11am - 6pm
Saturday	11am - 6pm
Sunday	1pm - 5pm