Albert Chong Artist Talk - East Window

Albert Chong will discuss his current exhibit at East Window and other works

$5.00 suggested. No one turned away.

Photographic portraits have become a normal and almost egalitarian ritual in western societies, but the same is not true in the so-called Third World. Many of those pictured in Albert Chong’s Jamaican Portraits series had rarely been photographed, and viewed these portraits as important milestones in their lives. This ongoing project describes the historicity of Chong’s cultural kin and has enabled the artist to make wider contact with Jamaicans with whom he shares a cultural and linguistic heritage. Chong thinks of art as “humanity’s second language, a universal tongue that has infinite dialects, meanings and ideas.” His portraits are intimate and political—exploring the story of humanity’s rapidly disintegrating connection to the natural world, while giving expression to human visual intuition, operating at levels often inhospitable to verbal or literary expression.

Chong was born in Kingston, Jamaica, W. I. in 1958. He is the last of eight children of merchant Chinese and Afro Jamaica parents. He immigrated to the USA in 1977 at the age of 19 years. Chong has an extensive and varied body of work in photography, installation, video, sculpture and artist books. His visual narratives on race, identity, family, nationalism, mysticism and spirituality have earned critical recognition and have been included in exhibitions such as the Havana Biennial in Cuba, the Sao Paulo Biennial in Brazil, the Johannesburg Biennial, the Santo Domingo Triennial, and the Venice Biennial. Chong has been written about in numerous publications including Art in America, the New York Times, and has been published in many books on art, the History of photography, as well as books on Jamaican, Caribbean, Asian-American and African-American art. He was also the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Photography, the Pollock-Krasner grant and the Guggenheim Fellowship in photography.