Join us for the virtual opening of “Wen-hao Tien: Home on Our Backs” next Thursday, February 4, at 6:00 pm. Attendees will see (virtually) the exhibition, hear more about Tien’s artistic process and participate in discussion. With special guest Ben Sloat, multimedia artist, Director of the MFA in Visual Arts at Lesley University. This exhibition is distilled from Boston Chinatown stories learned during the artist’s 2020 artist-in-residence at Pao Arts Center. With much personal reflection, enlivened by Chinese folklore and culture, this interdisciplinary work is a refreshing take on nomadism, and on Asian American stories.
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About the Artists
Photo credit: Jacyln Poeschl
Wen-hao Tien is a Cambridge-based visual artist and educator. Wen-hao grew up in Taiwan, with family roots in Shandong Province, China. She moved to the United States in 1988 to pursue graduate studies and ultimately became a naturalized citizen.
Early in her career, Wen-hao exhibited contemporary Chinese calligraphy and multi-media paintings. In recent years, she finds herself leaving the studio and to forage for materials and stories on community streets—which brought her to Boston Chinatown. She feels an urgency to interpret the shifting Chinatown cultural landscape, which has changed radically since she first encountered it in the 1990s.
Born and raised in New York City, Ben Sloat earned degrees from UC Berkeley and the SMFA. His work has been shown in venues such as the Havana Biennial (Matanzas), Kunsthal Charlottenborg (Copenhagen), Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), Dublin City Gallery/The Hugh Lane (Dublin), Peabody Essex Museum (Salem), Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Richmond), and the Queens Museum. Solo exhibitions include those at Das Klohauschen (Munich), Steven Zevitas Gallery (Boston); Coop Gallery (Nashville), Galerie Laroche/Joncas (Montreal), Gallery 126 (Galway), Front Gallery (Oakland), and the American Cultural Center (Taipei). He is the director of the MFA in Visual Arts program at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA.
Contact: Leslie Condon