CHẾ (Vietnamese American, b. 1996)

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Identifying by their last name, Diana Chế is a German born, Vietnamese-American interdisciplinary visual artist and cultural educator based in Los Angeles. They work across various mediums to express the complexity of immigrant experiences through drawing, calligraphy, sculpture, multimedia, and installation. Influenced by their family’s refugee background, their experimental body of work is a reservoir of dedicated research informed by themes of constructed identity, material sustainability, and collective healing.​

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​Their practice serves as an exploration into the ambiguous truth that are remnants of war, producing an intimate connection to ancestral rituals and spaces of familiarity through the act of creation. Oscillating between a process and conceptual based practice, they lean on instinct and knowledge to create art, which plays upon the traditional sensibility of culture and contemporary speed of globalization. Influenced by sentiments of searching and longing for home that is reflective of many migrant communities, she's interested in reinterpreting ways to archive and preserve memory as an alternative form of healing from intergenerational trauma.​​

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Chế has exhibited work nationally at the Angels Arts and Cultural Center Gallery in San Pedro, Mardag Gallery at the Franconia Sculpture Garden, and Mandeville Gallery at the University of California, San Diego. Her drawings and paintings are in private collections around the United States, Germany, and France.

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Intuitively following her diverse interests, she earned her BA in Economics with minors in Visual Arts and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego.