Irene Chan was born in Chinatown, San Francisco, in a bright pagoda-shaped hospital. In the days before bilingual or English as Second Language programs, she bounced around many public schools with a thick speaking accent, misunderstood and sometimes placed in “special” classes. During her undergraduate study in architecture, and while waiting for an architecture job to start in London, she traveled to the Orkney Islands, Scotland, she awoke one morning with the desire to return home, take art classes, and learn etching not knowing what that was. Later in art graduate school as she was brushing bubbles in an etching bath with a feather, she recognized the etching plate as the tidal island. Spurred by a harrowing encounter with an aggressive racist, Irene began creating deeply personal works exploring her experiences as an Asian American. Blending process, personal experience, and identity, the artist’s multifaceted body of work spans print media, printmaking, papermaking, photography, book arts, installation, and performance.

Irene came to ´ace to work on a project she called Women’s Secret Pockets: L’s Mother. During her time in the studio, and in Buenos Aires, Irene walked and recalled shapes, and discovered the local folklore tale of the seventh son werewolf that still persists to this day. Intrigued, she decided to portray this story from a woman’s perspective. Secret pockets were popular in Europe from the 17th to 19th centuries, when no pockets were sewn into women’s clothing, unlike men’s clothing. She silkscreen-printed on fabric with shapes that she saw in the city and museum outings. This fabric was then sewn as the secret tie-on pockets, and housed in the twin pockets were a soft book of portrait drawings of her sons, a cameo with an embroidered letter L, a Faja inspired picture scroll that can be worn, and a shopping list.

ARTIST STATEMENT

I am a multi-disciplinary conceptual artist who works in print media and performance, hand papermaking, book, fiber, and installation art. Environment: I explore and examine the physical environment and environmental issues, as well as my childhood environment of American popular culture. Experience: I create works to combine my thoughts into a form that shares my experiences and views with others. My telling is of being an Asian American woman in this time frame, and how the influences of the past and questions of the future affect how I live. Ephemera: My work investigates the forces that are the basis of our everyday world. I am interested in patterns and natural phenomena in the cosmic order, like growth and decay: things that are in the movement of evolving from or devolving toward nothingness or things that are temporary.