Matthew Chan

Los Angeles based artist

Identity as a Chinese American male informs Matthew Chan work and has driven him to construct a visual language that acknowledges and questions the formation of identity. His process examines various power structures that affect perception with regard to cultural, sexual, and societal pressures, including parental environment, geography and community, the inheritance or loss of cultural history, soft racism and micro-aggressions towards Asians, a historic lack of positive representation in media, the assimilation of Western cultural/capitalist ideals, and the tropes attached to the model minority label.

Matthew is compelled to create in order to help fill a void in contemporary art practice where there is a lack of representation of my existence. His practice explores and questions where facets of history intersect with contemporary manifestations of the identity of a Chinese American man. 

Images of race and identity by African American artists Kerry James Marshall and Carrie Mae Weems, and socio-political and cultural commentary by Martha Rosler inform my practice. Robert Heinecken’s mediation of the female through photomontage, and Jeff Wall’s photographic tableaux influence my process.

His practice of image making, includes photographic approaches of portraiture and landscape to explore the Asian American diaspora’s place within the contemporary American landscape.