Ann Phong: Re-Evaluating Normal at Cal State Fullerton's Begovich Gallery.

For over four decades, artist Ann Phong's paintings offered a glimpse of societal and global challenges that reshaped her as an individual and we, as a society. Phong's new body of work in Re-Evaluating Normal focuses on the sequence of crises amplified during the pandemic. Rendered in vibrant hues, intense impasto textures, and embedded found objects, her large-scale paintings ruminate on memories of migration; the ongoing Covid 19 pandemic; contemporary social, political, and racial tensions; and the negative impact of humans on the environment. Through expressive abstraction, Phong transforms her paintings into an invitation to pause, think, and recalibrate how we co-exist and prompts us to re-imagine building a better normal.

Ann Phong received her MFA at CSU Fullerton ('95). She has exhibited nationally and internationally at select venues such as the Watts Towers Art Center (Los Angeles, California), the Laguna Art Museum (Laguna Beach, California), Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art (Kitakyushu, Japan), Center Art Gallery (Vancouver, Canada), Gandong Art Center (Seoul, Korea), and Andaman Museum (Bangkok, Thailand). She served as Board President of the VAALA (Vietnamese American Arts and Letters Association) between 2009 and 2018. She is faculty in the Department of Art at Cal Poly Pomona, where she teaches Drawing and Painting.

Artist's website: annphongart.com

"Ann Phong: Re-Evaluating Normal" is organized by CSUF Nicholas + Lee Begovich Gallery and is curated by Jennifer Frias, Gallery Director/Curator, with curatorial support from Kaina Bernal, MA Candidate in Public History '22 and Anna Ponomareva, BA Candidate in Art History '22. Support for the exhibition and the gallery is made possible through the Art Alliance, Associated Students, Inc. Instructional Related Activities, the College of the Arts, and the Department of Visual Arts.

Image: Ann Phong, "From Sunrises To Sunsets," 2021, Acrylic on canvas, 30"  x  60," Courtesy of the artist