Zeff fellow to study art in the Chinese diaspora

Zeff fellow to study art in the Chinese diaspora

BY ARIE WILSON
Rice News staff

Recent Rice University graduate Kelly Wright has received the 2006 Roy and Hazel Zeff Memorial Fellowship.

Brown College’s Wright graduated in December with a bachelor’s degree in political science and Asian studies. Under the auspices of the Zeff fellowship, she will spend the next year traveling to Australia, England, France, Hong Kong, Italy, Singapore and Taiwan to study biennales, biannual contemporary art festivals.

Kelly Wright

The Zeff fellowship was created by Stephen Zeff, the Herbert S. Autrey Professor of Accounting at the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management, for the Rice student who received the most votes to be nominated for a Watson Fellowship but did not receive that award. The fellowship gives students $25,000 to travel abroad and spend one year working on a research project.

Wright’s research project, titled “Contemporary Art in the Chinese Diaspora,” will focus on how transplanted Chinese people express and react to cultural differences in their host countries.

Wright grew up in the small town of Naples, Fla., with a white father and an American-born Chinese mother. In that environment, there was little opportunity for Wright to become intimate with Chinese traditions and there were no other Asian families for her to relate to. As a result, her first real exposure to an Asian community came when she relocated to Houston.

“Being biracial myself, I have always been interested in issues of identity,” Wright said. “Until I went to college I only had an awareness of my Asian heritage. It was through my experience at Rice and in Houston that I gained knowledge and experience.”

After taking classes at Rice and studying abroad in China for a semester, Wright decided Chinese diaspora would be the perfect topic to pursue as an independent, international research project.

“I myself am a member of the Chinese diaspora,” she said. “It’s both personally and educationally interesting to me to study how people grow up in two cultures, how they balance the differences and develop into a blend of both influences.”

Wright will leave for her yearlong project at the end of June, stopping first in Sydney, Australia, where she will spend three months studying with curators of modern art museums and following two biennales.

“Through my observation and analysis of contemporary art, I hope to ascertain the functionality of art to the individual artist and to society as a whole,” Wright said. “I’m interested in how identity and culture manifest themselves in artwork and if these concepts connect with audiences.

“I hope to find a similarity of theme and a symmetry of experience in my travels to various diaspora communities that will allow me to understand the global capability of art to communicate changing cultural values.”