Utilizing media spanning video, sculpture, drawing, and installation, Pei-Hsuan Wang’s practice inquires 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 archetypes in nature and in myths. Animal presences 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.
