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Angela Chen

Assistant Professor

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Portrait of Angela Chen

Biography

Curriculum Vitae
  • MFA, Photography, Yale School of Art
  • BFA, Film and Media Studies, California State University, Los Angeles

Angela Chen 陳勇氣 is a Taiwanese-American photo-based artist, writer, and educator from the ethnoburbs of the San Gabriel Valley, California. Incorporating personal narrative, alternative photographic processes, and recycled and found material, her practice enacts what she calls thinking and making with the ground–a process of sustained attention to place that is rooted in the photo walk. Her work foregrounds what is typically in the background, showing how what we consider “beneath us” comprise multiple, entangled, more-than-human kin. She often prints her photographs on fabric dyed with foraged, fallen material, such as nuts and oak galls, immersing her images in the specific ecologies in which they were taken.

Angela is a graduate of the Yale School of Art, where she was an Alice Kimball Traveling Fellow and Art and Social Justice Grantee.

Work

Patchy Anthropocene (Buffalo Bayou) is an 11 foot by 28 foot photo-textile collage of photographs taken along Buffalo Bayou, an urban waterway that runs through Houston. Made up over six hundred inkjet-printed sheets of recycled cotton muslin dyed with acorns, the bottom portions of the piece are greener, showing more trees, flowers, birds, insects, and wetlands, whereas the upper portion of the piece, which depicts recycling plants and petrochemical industries along the Houston Ship Channel, is grayer. The work is installed at the Moody Center for the Arts. Angela Chen: Patchy Anthropocene (Buffalo Bayou) Faculty Angela Chen: Patchy Anthropocene (Buffalo Bayou)