Albert Chong – Featured Artist, January/February 2023

Albert Chong was born in Kingston, Jamaica, W. I. in 1958. He immigrated to the USA in 1977 and resided in Brooklyn, New York. He attended the School of Visual Arts in New York City where he received a BFA with Honors in 1981. Chong received his MFA from the University of California, San Diego in 1991 and in the same year accepted a faculty appointment at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is presently professor of art at the University of Colorado in Boulder where he teaches photography.

Chong has received various awards for his work in the visual arts. These include artist fellowships from the states of New York, California and Colorado as well as a 1992 Individual artist Fellowship from the national Endowment for the Arts. In 1998 he was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of photography and the Pollock Krasner Grant. He has represented Jamaica in many international biennials and national and international exhibitions including the 2001 Venice Benniale, the 1998 Sao Paulo Biennale and the seventh Havana Biennial in Cuba in 2000.

Statement:

Albert Chong is a contemporary artist working in the mediums of photography and installation art. His works have referenced personal mysticism, spirituality, race and identity. His work in photography sometimes utilizes found, appropriated and familial photographs as well as many types of objects primarily of an organic nature that serve as shamanic talismans and symbolic and referential signifiers. These works aspire to visually embed the narratives of race and ethnicity with the aesthetic whimsy required to sublimate and catalyze meaning and references. These works use analog and digital layering to create the sometimes dense but usually simple arrangements that infer, relate, connect and signify the complex nature of the struggles of the displaced peoples of the Asian and African diaspora.