Throughout the run of the Jamaica Biennial 2017, which continues until May 28, we will be posting short features on the participating artists. This one is the last on the special projects by international invitees, with Andrea Chung as its subject. Andrea Chung’s installation, titled Pure, is on view at Devon House. She is one of the winners of the 2017 Dawn Scott Memorial Award.
Andrea Chung (1978) is an American artist of Jamaican and Trinidadian parentage, who was born in Newark, New Jersey, and currently lives and works in San Diego, California, USA. She holds a BFA in Illustration from the Parsons School of Design, NYC (2000) and an MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), Baltimore, Maryland (2008). In her words, “my work examines cultures created under the influence of colonial and post-colonial regimes…I mine foodstuffs, recipes and archival materials such as photographs and tourist publications, in order to reconstruct and create a new series of narratives, which I juxtapose against the stories told by the colony to sell romantic notions about nature and labor.” Chung’s work is strongly focused on process and materials, such as sugar and soap, both of which resonate with the narratives she unravels and reconstructs. Her contribution to the Jamaica Biennial 2017, the mixed media installation Pure, is part of the body of work that is based on the research she has conducted on traditional midwifery in Jamaica.
Website: andreachungart.com
