Angela 陳勇氣 (she/her) is a Taiwanese-American photo-based artist, writer, and educator from the ethnoburbs of the San Gabriel Valley, California. Her early work combines autobiographical texts with photographs from personal and family archives to explore the immigrant experience, the process of assimilation, and intergenerational trauma. In the past few years, she has embraced an expanded mixed-media practice that calls attention to immigrant materialities and ecological entanglements. Using assemblage as a metaphor for diasporic identity- and world-building, her most recent work incorporates a range of media — photographic prints and transparencies, photo transfers, textile, plastic, and everyday detritus. Foregrounding how the act of photographing is embedded in specific political and ecological realities, she weighs her photos down, printing on fabric and encasing photographs in plastic. This process eschews digital photography’s tendency toward dematerialization, smoothness, brightness, clarity of detail, and instant circulation, enacting what Donna Haraway calls “staying with the trouble” — “learning to be truly present…as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings.”
     Angela is a graduate of the Yale School of Art, where she was an Alice Kimball Traveling Fellow and an Art and Social Justice Grantee. She has given guest lectures at Yale and Stanford University. She previously taught photography at New York University and Rice University and is currently an assistant professor at the Stamps School of Art & Design. She is one half of chensisterslookingatthings.

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