Studio Artist

Kien Situ

Above: Kien Situ, 2025. Photo: Volodomyr Kravchenko

Kien Situ (b.1990) is an architectonic artist whose practice spans sculpture and space. Informed by his diasporic heritage at the juncture of contemporary global cultural theory with ancient Sinospheric philosophies, he explores matter, ruin, distance, numerology, and time in relation to cultural dislocation.

Situ reconfigures structures and space through encounters formed by destabilisation, tension, and hybridity. Drawing from deconstructivist, minimalist, and brutalist spatial methodologies, his work merges ancestral materials with modern techniques. Chinese Mò ink is central to his practice, altered through architectural materials. By displacing and reorienting these elements - while ‘reincarnating’ old works into new forms - he examines the destructive relationality between matter and identity, envisaging the cartography of his practice as an ‘endless, formless ruin.’

Situ has exhibited at Artspace, 4A, Passage, The University of Sydney amongst other local institutions. In 2025-2026, he was selected to be a resident artist as part of Artspace’s Studio Program and will be showing at Australian National University, Bankstown Arts Centre, Nasha Gallery, and undertaking an artist residency at Bundanon. His work belongs to Deloitte’s Corporate Art Collection and various private collections. Alongside this, he has designed numerous exhibitions at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

In 2024, he was shortlisted for Create NSW’s Artspace Visual Arts Fellowship and Lee Ufan Arles x Maison Guerlain Prix Art & Environment. In 2025, he is be presenting an artwork for the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025: Intelligens for HOME at the Australian Pavilion.

He holds a Bachelor of Architecture (UNSW, 2016) and a Masters of Architecture (USYD, 2025).

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