Peter Chin

Peter Chin

For 30 years, Peter Chin has been creating work in multiple medias that has gained him great respect from peers, audiences and critics in Canada and abroad. Critics and writers have frequently commented not only on the sheer visceral impact of his work, but also the philosophical/intellectual substance of his themes. Michael Crabb, dance critic and host/producer of CBC’s The Arts Report, wrote in 1993 that “Peter Chin is a multi-disciplinary artist with the courage to take on weighty themes.” and earlier in 1989 "The sheer scope of Chin’s imagination commands respect.” Chin’s themes have been timely and seminal in Canadian art of the last 30 years, coinciding with the country’s evolving identity as an (imperfect) global exemplar for multicultural societies and immigration practices.

 Chin was born of mixed parentage, Chinese, Irish and Afro-Caribbean, in Jamaica in 1962. This connection to the diversity of the world’s people in his blood, Chin believes, set into motion his artistic predilections, that continued on when he moved to Toronto in 1964, where decades later, the city would be recognized as one of the leading multicultural cosmopolitan areas in the world, interculturalism/multiculturalism becoming part of the very core of Toronto’s identity. This right-time-right-place has allowed Chin to be supported in order to create art with a view of the world as one place, questioning how diversity of all things can be meaningfully contemplated as one, notions of cultural fluidity, how fragments can be put back together, how the cultures of original peoples can be acknowledged, embraced, and how their loss of integrity speaks compellingly to us.

Productions

Photos