ALISON CHEN

I Want to Hear the Waves

California, United States • alisonchen.com

  • I am exploring my conception of motherhood, and how it is shaped by my experiences as a daughter, my relationship with my mother, and the lineage of mothers throughout the generations.

    Drawing from generations of stories, photographs, folklore, trauma, and family history, the images are a mixture of my personal encounters as a mother and daughter, and are directly influenced by my relationship to mothers within my ancestral lineage. I am interested in how the term “mother” is constructed and understood, and how this identity is broken up, shattered, erased, and reconfigured.

    Interspersed, arranged, overlapped, are a myriad of images touching on the impermanence of life, the blurring of bodies, and the historical touchstones that ground my experience as a mother. Through crafting moments of my experiences for the camera and re-staging and reinterpreting archival footage, I aim to link generations together and create a circuitous slowing down of time. This ongoing body of work considers my understanding of motherhood, directly influenced by those of past generations.

    Ultimately, my work explores the concurrent existence of bliss and fear while reconciling with temporality.

  • The body of work combines photographs of varying sizes, video projection, and other installation pieces.