INFO
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Photo by Peter Rosvik
Celeste Viv Ly (b. Seattle, WA) is a London/NYC-based Cantonese-American queer interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and writer inquiring into the symbiotic potentials between biotechnological processes, speculative mythscience, and bodily registers of rupture and synergy. Celeste's practice encompasses time-based/sculptural/multimedia installations, diegetic prototypes, performance, software, and text. Synthesising design fiction, organic-synthetic processes, subcultural material-syntaxes, and fictioning in dialogue with peripatetic lifeworld and the technoscientific imaginary, their research and practice question and examine the artefacts of interspaces/non-places, and the agential entanglement in continual processes of becoming. Tracing the Sisyphean cycles that entwine the human/more-than-human, technocultural, symbolic, and sacrificial, their works render how the in-between in peripatetic and hyperstitional contexts and the exigent nature of risk could be potentialised to transform intricate structures of the socio-cultural macrocosms we exist in.
Shortlisted for Mozilla Foundation Fellowship (US, 2026), Somerset House Studios x CCI Creative Technologies Fellowship (UK, 2023 & 2024) and New Museum's NEW INC Y11 (US, 2024), received grants from ACE DYCP (UK, 2025) and Sasakawa Foundation (UK, 2023, as part of Liminal Bodies Research Group), Celeste has exhibited and performed internationally at Tate Modern lates programme (UK), Kyoto Art Centre (JP), ACUD Matcht Neu (DE), NARS Foundation (US), Gossamer Fog (UK), and so on. Their collaborative projects have been shown at Forma Arts & Media (UK), Goethe-Institut (DE), Milan Art Week (IT), HIAP Residency (FI), LungA Festival (IS), etc. Celeste's works have been featured in Art Monthly (UK), Hyperallergic (US), Der Tagesspiegel (DE), Artribune (IT), Clot Magazine (UK), Tokyo Art Beat (JP), and other platforms.
Celeste is the co-founder of the creative platform Æon Project and artist-run initiative O-O-Operation Theatre Purplebl0od Lab, and the artist in residence at Posthuman Research Sound Laboratory and AI Research Group with Foreign Objekt initiative. They recently delivered artist talks at Kyoto Art Centre (JP) and University of Westminster (UK). Celeste has co-curated and organised projects and performance events in London, Shanghai, Berlin, etc. Their writings have been previously published in publications such as Pressing Matters (UK), Ethics Magazine (US), and Lungs Project (US) poetry anthology New Landscapes.
Currently experimenting with the convergence of art, biotech and materials science, Celeste graduated with an MA in interdisciplinary art practice from Royal College of Art and BA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London. Born on Coast Salish land (Seattle) and raised in Shanghai and Anishinaabe land (Detroit, MI), Celeste's work is catalysed by their nomadic upbringing, an architectural family background, and conundrums reflective of collective issues around expatriation, displacement, and agency. Various spaces are indexed and interpolated in their work — abject and surreal, transitory/perpetual, (im)material interspaces.
CV and work list PDF available upon request.
Instagram @virtio.djvu
Contact celestevivly@gmail.com
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