Forming

Peggy sees innocent objects all around her that move her. Who brought this mailbox to this place, and what is their story? What letters are hidden in it? When she walks, works or spends a moment with friends and family, there is always an object in the space that catches her attention, and for which she thinks up a story. She also captures this feeling in her sculptures. It is an object, reconstructed in a moment in time, for which you can imagine a whole history.

Close your eyes and imagine your favorite room. Which object catches your eye? How do you tell the story of that object, without words?

A ready-made is a term used in the art world to describe an everyday, industrial object that is declared art by an artist, often without any material processing. Peggy also gratefully uses this invention in her sculptures.

Disposable containers also have different meanings for Peggy. They are objects that everyone comes into contact with at some point, that you can encounter everywhere and that have many stories behind them. For Peggy, they have another meaning…

Peggy's parents had a Chinese-American restaurant. So she grew up with the disposable aluminum food containers and she knows the stories from the kitchen and behind the scenes inside and out. So for her, it is quite a personal object.

Just like in our Dutch Chinese-Indonesian takeaway restaurants, that food does not always resemble the 'authentic' dishes from a certain country. What is authentic then? We like to see our babi pangang on the menus for the feeling of authenticity, but that says little about authentic food. In Peggy's parents' restaurant, they sometimes left stains in the tablecloth to emphasize the feeling of authenticity.

Peggy Chiang (1989, San Francisco, USA) holds a Master of Fine Arts from Rutgers University and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Chiang lives and works in New York and Baltimore.