Bex Kwan

Artist in Residence (2018-2020)
Fall Space Grant (2018/209)
Upstart Program (2017)

Bex Kwan is a multimedia artist, organizer, social worker, and athlete who was born and raised in Singapore. Engaged in a lifelong process of undoing the effects of growing up in a Chinese supremacist culture, they are invested in creating loving movement spaces and consider deep friendship to be the basis of their work.

Bex first became politicized through queer and trans organizing for mental health care, and then later cut their teeth as a young organizer through anti-racist student organizing in social work graduate school. As the Senior Organizer at the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum (NAPAWF), they worked on national, state, regional, and local reproductive justice campaigns and facilitated grassroots organizing trainings for young Asian women and gender non-conforming people. Currently, Bex is building a peer counseling collective to address mental health needs in the New York City Asian and Asian American community.

Bex’s organizing practice is inseparable from their creative practice. Their art making spans performance, poetry, and installation. With their creative partner So Mak, they are artists in residence at Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX).

So + Bex (So Mak and Bex Kwan) are not the same person. However, they are best friends who are both queer, gender non-conforming Chinese artists of roughly the same height (Bex is an inch taller), working with shadow, sound, and performance. Both alumni of EmergeNYC, the Hemispheric New York Emerging Performers Program, they began developing their collaborative artistic vocabulary at Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX), first as participants in the Upstart Program 2017-18, Space Grantees 2018, and then as Artists in Residence from 2019-2021. So + Bex were featured at The Brick’s 2018 Trans Theatre Festival, were Spring 2019 BRIClab residents, and were featured at The High Line’s Out of Line series in July 2019. So + Bex are 2021-22 Jerome Hill Artist Fellows.

Find So + Bex online at soandbex.com and on Instagram at @soandbex.