INFO
'29 '1 '58 '48 '17
Photo by Peter Rosvik
Celeste Viv Ly (b. Seattle, WA; they/ve/xyr/vir) is a London/NYC-based Cantonese-American queer interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and writer inquiring into the symbiotic potentials between speculative mythscience, biotechnological processes, 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 and political nature of risk could be potentialised to destabilise and transform intricate structures of the socio-cultural macrocosms we exist in.
Recently shortlisted for Somerset House Studios x CCI Creative Technologies Fellowship (UK, 2023 & 2024) and 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, Kyoto Art Centre, Gossamer Fog, Staffordshire St, Ugly Duck, ACUD Galerie, Konstepidemin, Shedhalle Tübingen, SYSTEM Shanghai, Enclave Projects, and so on. Their collaborative projects have been shown at Forma Arts & Media, LungA Festival, HIAP Residency, Milan Art Week, etc. Celeste's works have been featured in Clot Magazine, Art Monthly, Hyperallergic, Tokyo Art Beat, Artribune, Artscape, O Fluxo, Saliva Live, 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, Kyoto, and University of Westminster, London. 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, Ethics Magazine, and Lungs Project poetry anthology New Landscapes.
Currently experimenting with the convergence of art, biotech and materials science, Celeste received their BA with first class honours in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London and an MA in interdisciplinary art practice from Royal College of Art.
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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