Faces From My Past



Albert Chong is a contemporary artist working in the mediums of photography, installation, sculpture, and video. His work engages directly with personal mysticism, race, ethnicity and identity. Chong’s imagery is a visual celebration of beauty, ancestry and spirituality.


In his installation at Project Row Houses, Faces From My Past (2010) consists of complex photographic collages. The large-scale collages are a culmination of portraits pulled from Chong’s personal archived photographs of friends and strangers. He digitally removed the faces of the individuals from the original photographs and used them as the pixels or building blocks for the recreation of larger scaled photographs of various people. The faces depicted in the larger photographs are primarily people of African and Asian descent, but also include people of European descent. The layering effect in this work becomes symbolic of how generations and communities build upon the knowledge and existence of others.







Albert Chong was born in Kingston, Jamaica, W. I. He attended the School of Visual Arts in 
New York City where he received a BFA. Chong was awarded a 1992 Individual Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1998 he was awarded the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of photography and in the same year the Pollock Krasner Grant. He represented his country origin: Jamaica in four international 
biennials, including the 2001 Venice Benniale, the 1998 Sao Paulo 
Biennale and the seventh Havana Biennial in Cuba in 2000 and the 
first Johannesburg Biennial.

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