Menglan Chen was born in Chongqing and raised in Beijing. She recently graduated from Tufts University with a B.A. in Anthropology and a certificate in Communication and Media Studies. She is now pursuing an A.M. degree in Regional Studies East Asia at Harvard University.
Influenced by her transnational experience and her training in anthropology, she wants to produce critical visual ethnographies of the multitude of Chinese modernities. A recurring theme in her work is the everyday experience of margins as boundaries. Her images evoke the landscape of geographic detachment, which overlaps with marginal social categories. She is constantly moved by modern mankind’s incessant assertion of personal memories and negotiations of meanings vis-à-vis the dominant center. At the same time, she is also constantly reminded of the inevitably limited scale of our presence in front of the unknown and deeper forces.
