Left to right: Jo Ying Peng (photo by Kim Jakobsen To), Chantal Peñalosa Fong
Jo Ying Peng, curator and Director of the Vernacular Institute in Mexico City, Mexico, will host a conversation with Chantal Peñalosa Fong, a NYC-based Mexican artist whose practice engages deeply with questions of labor, and the border between America and Mexico. They will discuss working as diasporic artists abroad, and the contemporary politics affecting artists, curators, and academics based in the USA.
Jo Ying Peng Jo Ying Peng is a Taiwanese curator based in Mexico City, where she runs the Vernacular Institute—an independent art space that generates, presents, and exchanges ideas beyond institutional discourse. Her practice spans curatorial and editorial forms, investigating agency through experimental production methods rooted in performative and interdisciplinary approaches. Through the Vernacular Institute, Peng fosters a resonant platform weaving embodied encounters into shifting constellations of dialogue between Latin America and Asia, engaging critically with urgent socio-political concerns, with resistance as both anchor and horizon. Recent selected writing and editorial works: A Preface of Cloud : Written before Reflection (published by MARCO Museum in the exhibition El revés de la sombra no es el reflejo en el agua, Monterey, 2023), punctuation, onomatopoeia, and IKEA catalogue (published by KUA＃2: Displacement, London, 2023), šśhèëêēé (published by ARIEL in the exhibition Fear and Fauna, Copenhagen, 2023), A promised day? (Published by diSONARE, Mexico City, 2022), A Script for Untitled Age (published by Colector in the exhibition At the window, staring, Monterey, 2022), guest editor for TERREMOTO: Planetary Solidarity (Mexico City, 2021), and co-wrote and co-edited the book Compass Encompass (published by Taipei Contemporary Art Center, Taipei, 2021).
Chantal Peñalosa Fong studied for a Bachelor’s Degree in Visual Arts at the Autonomous University of Baja California, Tijuana campus, and the University of Sao Paulo, in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Her solo exhibitions include: Otros Cuentos Fantasmas, Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico (2024); Atlas Western, CEINA, Santiago de Chile, Chile (2023); Ghost Stories/Cuentos de fantasmas, Proyectos Monclova, Mexico City (2023); Another Million Moments, Centro de las Artes Nave Generadores, Monterrey, N.L. (2022); Mujeres en un jardín, Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City (2021); Atlas Western, MUAC, Mexico City (2021); There's Something About the Weather In This Place, Best Practice, San Diego, California, United States (2021). She has also been part of group exhibitions at Fondazione Prada, Venice (2023); Museo Jumex, Mexico City (2021); M HKA, Antwerp (2019), among others. Her work has appeared in publications such as Prime: Art’s Next Generation, Phaidon, 2022; Transnational Belonging and Female Agency in the Arts, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023; Chantal Peñalosa: A Universe On The Line, ESPAC, 2024, among others. She is currently part of the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum in New York.
Image description: Two headshots, left to right. (1) A Taiwanese woman in a turquoise shirt squatting on the ground in a brightly lit room (2) A woman with straight brown hair in a striped t-shirt, baseball hat, and glasses leaning against a concrete wall.