Vanessa Kwan

Unbuilt Door Unbuilt Door is a collaborative sound installation between Jiayu Zhang and Joana P. Cardozo during the emergency state of the COVID-19 pandemic in Spring 2020. Jiayu and Joana were studio neighbors at CalArts. This piece offers an imagination practice for the participants to visualize the border of their individual space. The participants are […]

Radical Practice Radical Practice is a series of podcast conversations between CalArts Graphic Design Program alumnae and current students. Each episode features an alumna with a distinct professional practice, including BFAs and MFAs whose endeavors range from cultural to corporate and from singular enterprises to ambitious ideas. We’ll discuss how they have defined success for […]

Water as a cleansing, invigorating, distortional, and transitional space. Motel pools as portals. Coloring and Layout Assistance – Lula Ochoa and Emily Malone My Swimmers – Lula Ochoa, Audrey Bandrowski, James Holsten, and Arius Ziaee Additional Camera Work – Savannah Perry Music by 11ai – www.ilai.link Thank you to the Calarts Risograph Printing Techs, especially […]

The Mermaid is a collaborative music video and one of the 6 pieces of my thesis project “Inner Creatures.” “Inner Creatures” explores the development motivations, characteristics and environments of the different sub-personalities within the psyche. “The Mermaid” is the sub-personality that deals with the emergence of sexuality, sexual identity, femininity and the need for self-determination. […]

Elements Elements is an interactive web-based installation that uses the classical Chinese idea of five elements (火 fire, 水 water, 木 wood, 金 metal, and 土 earth) to explore perspectives that contradict and coexist at the same time. Visitors to the web-page will be able to manipulate elements (as represented by Chinese characters), and see […]

Three kinetic sculptures explore relationships between circularity/co-opting/recycling and linearity/polarization/binary-ness, and how personal agency or positionality intersects with these linked mechanics. (They’re NOT “voting machines;” they reflect the operation of many large systems, frameworks and conversations, e.g., the relationship between the DIY ethos and capitalism, between the political far left and far right, and among nested […]

Wind and Wave Drawings is a series of motion drawings that intrinsically shows only one piece of thread; the video describes how the shape of the thread is changed by the wave of water and wind. By gathering these diversified shapes of the original thread, this project challenges the fundamental origin of the world that […]

15 Pendulums This is a Unity-based video piece, inspired by Reich’s Pendulum Music, but with a microtonal tuning based on a 1-3-5-7 combination-product set. The fundamental of this tuning is an upper 2/1 partial of the Schumann resonance 7.83 Hz. This Schumann resonance is basically the resonant frequency of the Earth’s electromagnetic field. Here is […]