“After School,” an exhibition of the work of Angela Chen, opening Saturday, August 9, 2025, 6pm, on view through September, 2025
Opening at Counterpath (7935 East 14th Ave. in Denver) on Saturday, August 9, 2025, at 6pm, and on view through September, Angela Chen’s exhibition After School brings together collage, sculpture, and new and historical photographs to unpack the culture of after school tutoring centers in California. Known as bu xi ban in Chinese, hagwon in Korean, and juku in Japanese, after schools are referred to colloquially as “cram schools” and by scholars as “shadow education.” Operating simultaneously as spaces of community, care, and control, these schools can be demanding and factory-like; but they also deliver essential childcare services to busy parents, many of whom are new immigrants.
As a child and young adult, Chen attended and worked at Futurelink School (qian zhan xue yuan), a bu xi ban and her parents’ business. Located in the San Gabriel Valley, CA, Futurelink served hundreds of primarily East Asian students, providing them with homework help and supplemental English and math lessons. Inspired by Futurelink’s vast archive of photographs, workbooks, objects, and advertisements, Chen’s exhibition appropriates educational materials to subvert the everyday tools of discipline and assimilation, explore the role of education in Asian American enclaves, and challenge stereotypes about Asian American students. A series of new assemblages combines Futurelink photographs with photographs of California Chinese schools during the Chinese Exclusion era to reflect on the ongoing legacies of racism, segregation, and US immigration policy within the Asian American experience.
The exhibit is based on Chen’s 2025 np: press publication, After School. The August 9 opening is free and open to the public, and will feature two other performances. Light refreshments.
This project was made possible with the support of the Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan.
Angela Chen (she/her) is a Taiwanese-American photo-based artist, writer, and educator from the ethnoburbs of the San Gabriel Valley, California. Her work combines autobiographical texts, photographs, and archival documents to explore the immigrant experience, the process of assimilation, and how we develop a relationship to place. Angela is a graduate of the Yale School of Art, where she was an Alice Kimball Traveling Fellow and an Art and Social Justice Grantee. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the Stamps School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan. She taught previously at Rice University and New York University. (author photo: Lorena Molina)