Chinn Wang

Chinn Wang’s art practice is concerned with the subjective nature of personal narrative and history and the examination of the fluidity and ambiguity of memory. Wang is interested in the digital and analog manipulation of images, pushing optical limits past the point of legibility into abstraction and then back again. In this way, images vibrate between clarity and obfuscation, demonstrating the futility and interplay between fiction and nonfiction. Her work seeks to create a non-passive viewing experience that compels a constant questioning of material, space, and image, highlighting the shifting balance between what is real and what is imagined.

The current and ongoing body of work originates from a series of photographs taken of Wang’s mother during her first years living in the United States after arriving from Hong Kong. The series of prints highlights her status as a woman, an immigrant, and a scientist—three imperiled communities in American society today—through a removal of the figures from the picture. Her mother’s absence from the images not only splices the picture plane, but also complicates a lost sense of lineage, heritage, and identity that sometimes follows the generations after emigration.