Bio, statement, and CV.

Bio

Francis Chung is a Dallas-based sculptor and art critic. He makes hand-built ceramic figures that look composed and are searching for something that cannot be found. He holds an MFA in Sculpture from Cranbrook Academy of Art (2019) and has completed residencies at Vermont Studio Center (2018) and the School of Visual Arts (2016). He writes art criticism and interviews for Glasstire.

Statement

In my younger days I was too sensitive, too aware, and too stuck in what I felt in my body. Making things was how I got through it. I'm steadier now, and I'm not beholden to any one feeling, but the overload still comes, and I put it into the work.

I make awkward human emotions into objects. Most feelings happen in a body, in a moment, in a room, and then, for most people, they're gone. Fire crystallizes the clay into something close to stone, and a base sets the figure in a place, so the feeling stays where it found me.

Fixed this way, a feeling can be walked around and looked at from the side, for as long as you like, which it never allows while you are inside it. I'm interested in what happens when someone stands in front of one and recognizes it: the afternoon, the room, the body they were in the last time they felt exactly this. The figures don't explain that moment. They hold it still long enough to go back in.