Monday, May 4, 6PM
Logan Center for the Arts, Penthouse Room 901
You are invited to join us at the Logan Center for the Arts for an OPC talk and screening with visiting artist Chantal Peñalosa Fong. Peñalosa Fong will screen her 2025 film Love Letters to Xin Xin (17:08) which as its title indicates, is a love letter addressed to Xin Xin, the last giant panda in Latin America born outside of China, who lives at the Chapultepec Zoo in Mexico City. Afterwards she will speak more broadly about her practice and recent projects where she connects genealogies forged through migration, labor, and displacement, interweaving the United States, Mexico, and China.
Chantal Peñalosa Fong is a multidisciplinary artist based in NYC. Through video, photography, sculpture, installation, writing, and performance, her body of work uncovers stories and sites beyond authorized histories. Born in the US–Mexico border region, she inhabits conditions marked by waiting, suspension, violence, and the spectral. Drawing from archives, site visits, collaboration, and elements of the biographical, her practice desires to make the unseen tangible, transforming forgotten histories into a visual language that unsettles official narratives and illuminates the enduring presence of what has always existed at the thresholds.
Peñalosa Fong lives the geopolitical with intimacy.
Presented by the Open Practice Committee in the Department of Visual Arts
Love Letters to Xin Xin, 2025 (17:08)
As its title indicates, is a love letter addressed to Xin Xin, the last giant panda in Latin America born outside of China, who lives at the Chapultepec Zoo in Mexico City. For decades, China employed what is known as panda diplomacy — the practice of gifting pandas to other countries as a diplomatic gesture. Over the years, pandas ceased to be gifts and instead were leased, which meant they remained the property of the Chinese government. Xin Xin is the only giant panda in the world that does not belong to China but is considered Mexican. The video explores themes such as loneliness, love, and shared diasporic identity through a personal reflection on belonging and longing.