ZOILA ANDREA COC-CHANG

Artist Statement

The looping metals, strung beans and chili peppers, and tangled food wrappers in my work are analogous to a language in which ephemeral ingredients are brought together with everyday materials to honor the experiences of those who have been perpetually unsettled across space and time. I collect food [waste], like corn husks, avocado pits, and orange peels, in their various states of decomposition from family, friends, shared meals, and local restaurants [from Guatemala City to Miami to Boston and places in between]. These materials are manipulated into intricate patterns, sculptural weavings, and incarnate objects and paintings that honor the interdependent relationships between cyclical forms of nature and our inheritances. 

I am inspired by the collectivities and imaginaries of the trans-oceanic kinship networks that have formed through various migrations and circulation of labor, especially those of my community. My work interrogates the complexities and intimacies between and within Asia and the Americas to reveal and work through the nuances of where and when these geographies collide. Through these gestures, I hope to forge new possibilities for existing beyond histories of struggle and territorially-bounded cultural representations. I foreground the resilience and bonds of my [Chinese-Guatemalan] diasporic kinship networks, both the chosen and inherited, as a means of seeding connections that are synonymous with their migrations, spiritual practices, foodways, and their everyday environments. Drawing from the dreams, ideas, economies, and ways of being and seeing of my ancestors, I meld a landscape in which human, nature, and the divine cannot be pulled apart. They can only be weaved together as a composite of resilience and transformation.

Zoila Andrea Coc-Chang is the 2022-2023 recipient of the Emma Bee Bernstein Fellowship.

CV