In the Studio: Peggy Chiang

Peggy Chiang is a Brooklyn-based artist and a 2024 Joan Mitchell Fellow. We interviewed her about her work and creative practice in February 2025.

I work in mixed-media sculpture and installation. My recent practice has been project-driven, with a focus on perception and sensorial estrangement.

For a while, I have been saying that I make images. I usually begin with an image and reverse engineer it. When I’m planning a show, the image expands outwards into a scene. Doubling is another narrative strategy, and I look for dualities to extract or pacify: ceiling fan and clock, fountain and bile, garbage truck and threshold.

With recent exhibitions, I have started with making one work that becomes the anchor for the rest of the project and writes the plot. The works that follow stage the encounter. I started graduate school with the singular goal of making one work—a plastic bag filled with trash that hops around like a rabbit—and developed a series of sculptures to contextualize it. spleen and ideal at Prairie, Chicago, was centered around bronze bells cast from hollow poppy pods. Fiend at hatred2 started with a souvenir that I remade as a ceramic figure.

I got the idea to make a garbage truck after driving behind one for miles on the Jersey Turnpike, and thought it could be a standalone sculpture—understatedly complex and, with the spotlit compactor at night, dramatic. And I had been thinking of ways to make a one-work show. After a site visit at Laurel Gitlen, I worked from the image of a truncated garbage truck in an empty room with a wall of windows, four floors above ground. It took seven months to reconstruct it piece-by-piece from photographs, and many cycles of breaking it down. There was a week when it looked brand new, freshly painted. The other pieces of the installation (leaves, cigarettes, commissioned sound) were added to perceptually disrupt a scene that’s visually straightforward and still.

I like combining big and small moves. The cigarettes came last when I was looking for ways to introduce smell, and they’re a recycled motif from old work. Filling paper tubes with incense is a very small move, but it gets you an autonomously burning cigarette.

It takes me a long time to process work, and I will sit with it long after the show’s over. There’s something about figuring something out too soon that kills it for me. I've heard it said before that to know something is to possess it, and I took to the opposite. I think it’s equalizing to stay with the unfamiliar, with not knowing, and resist the impulse to possess. My favorite artworks engage a nonverbal, deeply felt resonance.

I credit my earliest influences to formative years living in Baltimore. I started going to the city for basement hardcore shows in high school. I remember seeing a Ryan Trecartin show in someone’s house around the same time. Promotion would be a printed flyer with no address, sometimes scanned and posted to a message board. There was a kind of coded information that I got used to seeing with an invitation.

As a student, my main connection with art was through artist-run spaces. In dialogue with similar projects throughout the city, spaces like Franklin Street, Rope, and Evening Hours (NY) would have one-night only installations and performances almost every two weeks. Their programming and unmatched energy still influence how I view creative labor and installation.

Using consumable elements in a work, like vapor or open flame, are carried over from that time. While my work is not time-based, I consider the performance potential and temporality of an exhibition, perhaps with a certain disregard for posterity.

Now, I have a studio in the Brooklyn Army Terminal. It’s the first space I landed in after moving to New York a year ago. I’m still figuring out how to make work there and acclimating to the city. Currently, I’m splitting my workflow between the studio and a maker space in the building, where I do all of the fabrication work. Having to work around the shop’s hours means I have to be more organized with my time than I’m used to. I would eventually like to build a studio that has everything in one place, but it’s nothing perilous. I have to remind myself that six years ago, I only had a desk in my apartment and was making art from soda cans.

I’m currently making a series of mobiles, something I was avoiding but realized, they kind of always hit and I love a cheap trick. I’m using old measuring scales as hanging devices, which add an interesting weight parameter with the counterbalance. The slightest touch could make the whole thing nosedive in one direction. The precision makes it fragile.

The first work in the series is a steel saddle hanging from a produce scale. I’m shaping and welding pieces of sheet steel and pipe to be galvanized in the same manner as the basket it’s replacing. The other scales I’m using are balance beams with the classic, cast iron meat hooks and stamped increments. I’m interested in the transparency of weight that these objects insist on, and restrictions of their functionality. I’ll admit to exploiting a willful ignorance of Americana.

I’m currently working on a solo exhibition that’s opening this fall at Adams & Ollman in Portland, OR. Right before that, in July, I’ll be joining the studio residency at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, where I’d like to try working in video. In making and presenting work, I am always negotiating the relationship between myself, the artwork, and the viewer. I am curious about the possibility of fabricating distance, especially in relation to visibility and censorship.

I go back and forth these days on believing in art. It’s hard—it can be a lot of work for low return. I don’t make a living from sales, so on paper, I have a very expensive hobby. At the same time though, a lot of this difficulty comes from my insistence on making work in a way that is slow and exhausting, but interesting and rewarding to me. I think what keeps me going is the fact that I’m even able to do this at all. It’s a sunken-cost mindset, but it has taken me a long time not making art to grasp a working model, one where I am able to sustain a practice that is invigorated and affirmed through teaching.

I do love the dysfunction of it all. The world is so broken. If I can live in a way that’s by any means contrary, then I’ll choose that.

Interview and editing by Jenny Gill. Learn more about Peggy Chiang’s work at peggychiang.info.