Recent 93rd Annual Print Center exhibition finalist Chinn Wang cuts up and recasts her family’s photos to make sense of their missing pieces.

It’s like the classic riddle: what casts a shadow but cannot be seen? In Soaking Up Local Color, Chinn Wang’s solo show at Philadelphia’s Print Center, the answer might be something like “the past” or “history” or “family heritage.” The child of immigrant parents who purposefully chose to focus on their American future instead of sharing their family histories with their daughter, Wang addresses this gap in knowledge and representation in a haunting visual manner. The works on display are screen-printed enlargements of photographs of Wang’s mother, newly on American soil soon after she immigrated from Hong Kong in the 1960s in a variety of settings: a field of flowers by a mountain, the gravel of a parking lot, the manicured grass of a lawn.

Exhibition Review by Deborah Krieger