"I’ve Left My Body to Occupy Others"
Thursday, January 13, 4:00 p.m.
Watch a video of the Pei-Hsuan Wang lecture on YouTube
Utilizing media spanning video, sculpture, drawing, and installation, Pei-Hsuan Wang’s practice inquiries into personal insecurities navigating between the East and the West, two cultural and geographical delineations that have shaped her upbringing. Drawing from trauma, memory, family history, and aspirations, Wang’s work mines the vulnerabilities, contradictions, and beauty that reside in identity formation as an Asian woman in diaspora.
The artist’s 11-year-old niece Iris, a White and East Asian mixed-heritage, first-generation Taiwanese American, has inspired a body of work that imagines racial and cultural hybridity alongside various architypes in nature and in myths. Zoomorphic beings become a kind of guardian and portal, giving form to the inner experience, and opening up narratives that empower from the visceral as well as the imaginative.
Pei-Hsuan Wang holds a BA from Macalester College, MN and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art, MI, USA. She was resident at ISCP, New York (2018), Asia Culture Center, Gwangju, Korea (2018), and guest resident at the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam, Netherlands (2019). Wang is the winner of Special Jury Price of the 2019 Huayu Youth Award in China and is currently a candidate laureate at the Higher Institute of Art (HISK) in Ghent, Belgium.