CREDITS:
Illustration of Chantal Penalosa Fong by Maria Chen
All Artwork © Chantal Penalosa Fong
Images:
1- Boats.Junks.Photocopies II
2023
Silkscreen on linen 43 1⁄4 x 57 7⁄8 in
2- Boats.Junks.Photocopies III
2023
Silkscreen on linen 43 1⁄4 x 57 7⁄8 in
3- Places that seem to float, 2023
Gouache on digital print on Hahnemuhle William Turner paper of 310 g/m2
20.28 x 20.28 x 1.5 in
4-Crowded Places, 2023
Gouache on digital print on Hahnemuhle William Turner paper of 310 g/m2
20.28 x 20.28 x 1.5 in
5-Boats. Junks. Photocopies, V
2023
Silkscreen on linen
43 ¼ x 57 ⅞ in
6-Untitled., 2023
Diptych of inkjet prints on photographic paper, maple frame
20.98 x 50.39 x 1.3 in
7 to 10- (still images)
Fong, 2023
Video 4K
11’49’’
11- China Affair
2023- Ongoing
Lightboxes
50x70 centimeters each
12- Atlas Western
Video 4K
14’08’’
2020-2021
13 & 14- Atlas Western
Installation View, CEINA, Santiago de Chile, Chile
15- Unfinished Business Garage
2019-2025
86.61 x 167.32 x 18.11 in
Installation View, Museo Jumex, Mexico City
16 to 18-
2023- Ongoing
Lightboxes
Variable dimensions
Courtesy: The artist and Proyectos Monclova, Mexico City
In this conversation with CNTRFLD.ART, Mexican artist Chantal Peñalosa Fong delves into her multifaceted artistic practice, shaped by her upbringing in Tecate and her diasporic Chinese heritage. Describing Tecate as a "time capsule" caught between Americana and Mexican culture, Fong reveals how this unique backdrop informs her exploration of liminal spaces and forgotten narratives. She discusses her fascination with the complexities of identity and belonging, particularly through the lens of her family's history and the historical erasure of Chinese immigration in Mexico. By blending documentary research with fiction, Fong not only seeks to recover personal and cultural memories but also engages with broader societal themes, offering a poignant commentary on the immigrant experience. Through her work, she creates a space for voices often overlooked, illustrating the power of art as a tool for resistance and reappropriation.
CNTRFLD. Heritage Influence: How has your heritage and upbringing in Tecate shaped your artistic practice and the themes you explore in your work?
CPF. I have always thought that Tecate is like a time capsule, somewhat like a U.S. suburb trapped in the '70s, a small town with an ethos divided between Americana and Mexican culture.
This in-between space is where my works come from. Not from one side or the other. It comes from what’s inside, a sort of mutation, something strange.
That’s why some of my projects have to do with liminal spaces in a certain transition between life and death, a suspension of time, ghostly places, and incomplete or forgotten narratives.
Unlike other border cities with a faster pace, my hometown is slower. Tecate, being a non-main city, is more in touch with certain mysticisms and a slowing down of time. Other stories emerge, so to speak, from this further margin of margins.
Naturally, I am drawn to books or scenes that happen on peripheries or remote places; there’s something that attracts me to non-protagonist lives telling a story.
I imagine my projects dialogue with those mythologies through micro-stories that actually hide fundamental aspects to understanding what often remains outside certain capitalist logics. In this sense, I think they are forms of resistance.
I would say Tecate was my first artist's studio.
At the same time, I think of it as an oneiric place built between the blurry lines of fiction and reality. In the end, I believe everyone builds and demolishes their own cities.
CNTRFLD. Diasporic Perspective: As an artist of diasporic Chinese heritage, how do you navigate and express the complexities of identity, history, and belonging in your work?
CPF. I'm interested in the silences that exist between things, identifying certain voids that can open up other possibilities to reappropriate a story. I’m also very aware of the insufficiency of memory.
In my processes, I think a lot about the media I use and how they will interact with the ideas; it's part of creating a sort of constellation.
Reality is so complex and presents itself to us in many different forms, and that’s why sometimes it’s more effective for me to work with photography, video, installation, or any other medium—because that’s how I experience the world, as a place where the same message sometimes appears represented in multiple ways.
Fiction is another resource that helps me navigate those silences; I think of fiction as a mechanism that also constructs possible realities, futures that haven’t been, or pasts that were lost. I'm especially interested in those relationships with the present. I believe art is like a time machine that makes conversations between different historical moments possible, or that presents intuitions about what is coming.
It is by re-making history that a narrative can be re-appropriated.
CNTRFLD. Cultural Memory: In what ways do you incorporate elements of cultural memory and personal narrative into your art, particularly in relation to your family's history?
Working with personal and public archives reveals aspects absent in just one of these two. How to weave them is where my work occurs. Here is where I re-think a story. I am not so convinced now of thinking in terms of micro and macro narratives; rather, due to a series of decisions in the world, it has been considered that there are events that are more relevant in universal and, of course, capitalist terms. That is to say, some stories are more profitable than others and also more convenient for certain discourses, which is why what gets erased, forgotten, and disappears reveals aspects of what we fail to understand in the present. This is why I am interested in the past—not as a nostalgic aspect, but as something that can give us clues to see what is coming.
Fiction, in addition, is something that interests me, especially in the realm of the autobiographical. I believe there is a very thin line between memory and fiction. In the way a story is told through what we forget or add. This alteration can range from certain details to reworking an entire event.
In the case of my family history, the women who were left alone decided to change their Asian surname to a Western one to avoid harassment. For that reason, I use Fong in my name as a recovery and reclamation of what my maternal legacy had to hide.
CNTRFLD. Artistic Process: Can you describe your creative process when developing a project like “Fong”, which blends documentary research with fiction? What challenges and discoveries have you encountered?
CPF. "Fong" is primarily a love letter dedicated to the men in my family who disappeared during the anti-Chinese campaigns in Mexico. At some point, they went to San Francisco, California, intending to reunite when things changed, but that never happened.
The women who stayed in Mexico, including my grandmother, changed their names to Western ones, and talking about this history was forbidden until very recently.
Through this letter, I write about the experience of women in my family from the Mexican side who lived through the anti-Chinese campaigns and naturalized the idea of silence as protection—that is, not speaking about the past.
The process involved going to San Francisco, California, where I spent several days in the Chinatown area simply observing life through the camera—watching how people walked, the sounds, the shops, the colors, the decorations. I constantly thought about the possibility that, maybe without knowing it, I might suddenly cross paths with a family member I'll never recognize because we don’t know each other, or I thought perhaps they had all died or maybe returned to China. However, for me, it was essential to think of these presences in that place, with the possibility of finding each other, even if only through architecture or the same streets they saw.
I tried to intervene as little as possible while I was there, doing nothing but holding the camera and recording for long periods.
During those days, one night after filming, I wrote the letter that appears in the video.
Before all this, there was a prior process of reviewing several public archives in both Baja California and California about Chinese migration. It was in one of those archives that I saw my great-grandfather’s face for the first time. I had really found a missing family member, and all I could do at that moment was cry inconsolably, looking into his eyes. I couldn’t believe it. I printed the image and brought it to my grandmother, who initially couldn’t recognize him until she finally saw her father after 80 years of not seeing his photo. She is now 99 years old. Honestly, it has been one of the most beautiful and powerful experiences of working as an artist.
CNTRFLD. Women in the Arts: What is your perspective on being a woman in the contemporary arts scene, and how do you think it influences your work and experiences as an artist?
CPF. I think of my mother, my grandmothers, and other women I have known who didn’t have the opportunity to fulfil certain desires they had; however, they opened many paths that have shaped my sensitivity as a woman throughout my life. I owe much of this to them. For me, then, it is a responsibility to rework and even transform parts of those worlds. It’s a conversation with them and, at the same time, a tool to confront situations in the present, where gender roles and positions of privilege are still heavily marked in society and even within the art world.
I like to think that it is also the possibility of proposing another perspective on things happening in the world, which may have previously been explored from a masculine point of view. But it also holds the agency to propose new universes as well—something that a great legacy of women in the arts has long done from this awareness.
CNTRFLD. Addressing Erasure: Your work addresses the historical erasure of Chinese immigration in Mexico. How do you approach the responsibility of telling these often-overlooked stories through your art?
CPF. For many years, I have been interested in ghost stories and the paranormal. This interest comes from a family tradition; at my grandmother's house, during coffee time in the living room, there was always a moment in the conversation that turned to some supernatural aspect, where someone would end up telling a story that connected with the other threads of dialogue as if it were any other situation in everyday life that also needed to be shared. As a child, that was my favorite moment.
I have a collection of books about ghosts, and in recent years, I started reading about a literary genre in China called Zhiguai xiaoshuo, which can be translated as "tales of the strange." These are compilations of stories about reincarnations, supernatural, ghosts, and spirits. Those who dedicated themselves to collecting these narratives referred to themselves as “historians of unofficial stories.” There is something that intrigues me about this figure. Some scholars refer to these types of narratives as bad history because they depict scenes that cannot be verified as having happened; moreover, they consist of oral accounts that someone heard. Within this discussion, there is also another group of scholars who consider these tales as one of the origins of fiction in China.
At some point, while reading and thinking about these compilations, I felt a connection between this literary genre and how the stories of the Chinese diaspora have been treated. In public archives, and even in my own family's history and their journey to Mexico, it also appears as a story about the strange because that’s how Asian communities were seen upon their arrival. When I reviewed documents created by nationalist committees during the period of anti-Chinese campaigns, I noticed that the adjectives used to refer to Asians are very similar to those used in tales that speak of non-human beings. As if by crossing the Pacific, the Chinese became the other, the monstrous, the eerie, the disease, the apocalypse.
I find that the stories of Chinese migration have also been relegated to the ghostly. They have been treated as ghost stories within official histories. For me, this approach consists of a form of resurrection of the ghosts that history created.
CNTRFLD. Intersection of Borders: Given your focus on geographical tensions, how do you see the experience of inhabiting a border territory influencing both your art and your identity?
CPF. Most of the time, I work from autobiography. From a very early age, I was interested in thinking about what kind of images I could propose from a place like the border, which is overrepresented, especially in the media, using a very particular language that leaves out almost all the details surrounding the quotidian, basically, life on the border.
That aspect of living on the border is about dialoguing with the constant encounter of different worlds at the same time; it has something sci-fi about it, that part of entering and exiting different universes all the time. From the language to the way you behave on one side and the other, which changes when you cross into the other country because the culture is different, so you adapt because you already know how it works.
Something that always struck me as curious is the use of the seatbelt. In Mexico, no one wears a seatbelt, but the same person crossing into the United States would automatically put on the seatbelt while in the car because they know there is a penalty. This is an example of how border life is full of these details.
Perhaps from this experience comes my way of exploring different media; I am interested in what can be said from one place and what can be said from another.
CNTRFLD. Impact of the Past: How do you think the history of anti-Chinese campaigns in Mexico has shaped contemporary views on immigration and identity in both Mexico and the U.S.?
CPF. The first time I showed part of this project in my gallery in Mexico City, the first person who entered on the day of the opening left very angry because he said I had made it all up, and that none of that ever happened in Mexico. That reaction was very revealing about how little this episode is ignored in the country. However, I don’t believe that racism has ever disappeared. It’s something quite internalized that has passed down from generation to generation; it is very clear that deep-rooted prejudices against Asian communities still exist today and that they emerged during those years. Even though there has been a fascination for several decades with Asian cultures—from video games to aesthetic trends and even thought currents and spiritual practices that have been adapted in the West—I think there is a very present ambivalence.
CNTRFLD. Advice for Emerging Artists: What advice would you give to young artists, particularly those from diasporic backgrounds, who are pursuing a similar path in the arts?
CPF. Be kind to yourself and resist.
CNTRFLD. Future Projects: Are there any upcoming projects or themes you are excited to explore in your future work that builds on the ideas present in “Fong”?
CPF. This entire project about the Chinese diaspora in Mexico and the United States is still in progress. I am working on what will be my first book and on other pieces that are also love letters.
About.
Chantal Peñalosa Fong is an artist from Tecate, Baja California, Mexico, where she was born and raised. Her work explores the in-between spaces where boundaries and identities blur, and where histories and memories both merge and diverge.
Focusing on the tensions at borders—both geographical and cultural—with a particular emphasis on the Mexico-United States borderlands, she engages with concepts of otherness, strangeness, and the unfamiliar. Through this lens, her practice highlights the complexities of liminal spaces and the unique experiences they contain.
She is currently part of the prestigious Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. She studied for a Bachelor’s Degree in Visual Arts at the Autonomous University of Baja California, Tijuana campus, and the University of Sao Paulo, in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Her solo exhibitions include: Otros Cuentos Fantasmas, Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico (2024); Atlas Western, CEINA, Santiago de Chile, Chile (2023); Ghost Stories/Cuentos de fantasmas, Proyectos Monclova, Mexico City (2023); Another Million Moments, Centro de las Artes Nave Generadores, Monterrey, N.L. (2022); Mujeres en un jardín, Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, MexicoCity (2021); Atlas Western, MUAC, Mexico City (2021); There’s Something About the Weather In This Place, Best Practice, San Diego, California, United States (2021). She has also been part of group exhibitions at Americas Society, NY (2024), Fondazione Prada, Venice (2023); Museo Jumex, Mexico City (2021); MHKA, Antwerp (2019), among others. Her work has appeared in publications such as Prime: Art’s Next Generation, Phaidon, 2022; Transnational Belonging and Female Agency in the Arts, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023; Chantal Peñalosa: A Universe On The Line, ESPAC, 2024, among others.
