Bamboo Entwine As They Grow
Exhibition runs Saturday 6 December 2025-Saturday 14 February 2026
Bamboo Entwine as they Grow has been developed in collaboration by Bankstown Arts Centre (Western Sydney) and the Museum of Art and Culture, yapang (Lake Macquarie). This two-part exhibition focusses on the practices of three artists Tiyan Baker, Dr. Cindy Yuen-Zhe Chen and Sarah Ong, presenting new and loaned artwork across both sites.
The three artists have used bamboo to explore themes of labour, love, resilience and life transplanted, each through their own contemporary bamboo practice.
Baker, Chen and Ong show how remarkable the humble bamboo grove is. Despite its far-away origins, and its ‘primitive’ reputation, they recognise that bamboo plays a vital role in the lives of many people across Australia with spiritual and emotional significance.
With mutual admiration for each other’s artistic practices, the three artists had hoped to one day work together in a collaborative way. As this project has grown over both locations, the artists have shared skills, laughs, labour, research and memories born from having East and Southeast Asian backgrounds and mixed cultural upbringings in Australia.
Bamboo Entwine as they Grow plays on bamboo’s role in our contemporary world and speaks to the need for all of us to connect and share knowledge so we can grow and thrive together.
Bamboo Entwine as They Grow is a two-part exhibition across two locations! Explore both venues for the full experience:
Bankstown Arts Centre, Saturday 6 December 2025-Saturday 14 February 2026
MAC yapang, Saturday 13 December 2025-Sunday 15 February 2026
Cindy Yuen-Zhe Chen practices in Sydney on Darramuragal and Gadigal lands. Her expanded drawing, sound and video practice engages embodied listening and sounding to examine Southeast Asian Chinese diasporic identity as a generative and emplaced process. Through interactions with people and the material contingencies of places, Chen develops drawing, listening and sounding as interwoven practices that enact connections between ancestral trajectories and lived experiences.
Chen has been commissioned for solo exhibitions nationally and internationally by institutions such as 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art at the Australian National Maritime Museum in 2022, Willoughby City Council in 2021 and the Ningbo Museum of Art in China in 2018. In 2026, Chen will present an installation of video works, tactile sound sculptures and drawings in a curated exhibition at Verge Gallery.
As a recipient of the University Postgraduate Award, Chen completed her PhD at UNSW Art and Design in 2020. She was a finalist for the 2021/22 NSW Visual Arts Emerging Fellowship, Fisher’s Ghost Art Award 2025 and Hazelhurst Art on Paper Award in 2021/22/23. With work held in private and public collections, Chen has exhibited in Australia, China and England in solo, group, online and finalist prize exhibitions.
Image Credit: Taiyo Totsuka
Tiyan Baker is an artist who works with installation, photography, video and sculpture. Her practice draws on historical research, language, digital processes and material play to trace unseen relationships between words, place and stories. Centring her Bidayǔh culture in her works, Baker is also interested in things she has unknowingly inherited. Living far from native lands, culture and family, in the midst of the (re)colonisation of Borneo, she explores all that can be mistranslated or lost, and what can manifest in its place. She has shown her works widely across Australia, and is the winner of the 2022 National Photography Prize awarded by the Murray Art Museum Albury.
She was born and raised on the Larrakia lands known as Darwin and currently lives and works on the Awabakal and Worimi lands known as Newcastle, Australia.
Image Credit: Alfonse Chiu
Sarah Ong is a Chinese-Malaysian, Vietnamese-Cambodian Australian emerging artist living on the unceded land of the Bidjigal and Darug people in Sydney’s Southwest. Through Ong’s artistic practice of sculpture and performance, she explores how effort and labour are valued. Ong utilises organic materials to reflect on the art world and our way of living. Ong is informed by several areas of research, including vernacular architecture, industrial design, immigrant labour and cognitive psychology.
Sarah Ong graduated in 2025 from the University of New South Wales with bachelor’s in fine arts and psychology. In 2024, Ong exhibited in a group show at her first art institution with FirstDraft Gallery. Ong, recently in October 2025, attended the Bamboo Build and Design course at BambooU in Bali, Indonesia.
Image courtesy of the artist