Love Letters to Xin Xin, 2025 (17:08)
Fong, 2023 (12:10)
Screening & Dinner, Private Residence, August 23, 2025
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Love Letters to Xin Xin
As its title indicates, is a love letter addressed to Xin Xin, the last giant panda in Latin America born outside of China, who lives at the Chapultepec Zoo in Mexico City. For decades, China employed what is known as panda diplomacy — the practice of gifting pandas to other countries as a diplomatic gesture. Over the years, pandas ceased to be gifts and instead were leased, which meant they remained the property of the Chinese government. Xin Xin is the only giant panda in the world that does not belong to China but is considered Mexican. The video explores themes such as loneliness, love, and shared diasporic identity through a personal reflection on belonging and longing.
Fong mixes personal and public history to interrogate her own family stories. In the video, Peñalosa Fong reflects on the trajectories of relatives who disappeared as a result of anti-Chinese campaigns in Mexico during the early twentieth century, which forced several men from her family to migrate to San Francisco, where they ultimately went missing. The video, a love letter to those they lost track of, acknowledges their histories and presents their existences as ghostly figures who inhabit not only her mind but also larger national narratives.
Chantal Peñalosa Fong is a multidisciplinary artist from Tecate, whose practice takes geographic tensions at borders as a point of departure, with a particular focus on the Mexico-United States borderland. She explores phenomena such as violence, time, waiting, and suspended states, alongside ghostly narratives and places—those stories and sites that fall outside authorized versions of history.
Growing up in the small Mexican border town of Tecate, Baja California, as a descendant of Chinese immigrants, Chantal Peñalosa Fong navigates the in-between zones where boundaries blur, identities merge, and memories mutate. Her process explores these moments and spaces of transition, engaging with concepts of otherness, the strange, and the unfamiliar. Through this lens, she seeks to highlight the complexities of liminal spaces and the experiences they hold.
Chantal Peñalosa Fong holds a B.A. in Visual Arts from the Autonomous University of Baja California (Tijuana campus) and the University of São Paulo in Brazil. She was recent participant at the Independent Study Program (ISP), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2024-2025).
Solo exhibitions include Cuentos de Presagio, MAZ, Zapopan, Jalisco, (2025), Haunted at Kittredge Gallery, Tacoma, Washington (2025), Otros cuentos fantasmas at Museo Amparo, Puebla (2024); Atlas Western at CEINA, Santiago de Chile (2023) and MUAC, Mexico City (2021); Ghost Stories / Cuentos de fantasmas at Proyectos Monclova, Mexico City (2023); Another Million Moments at Centro de las Artes Nave Generadores, Monterrey (2022); Mujeres en un jardín at Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City (2021); and There's Something About the Weather In This Place at Best Practice, San Diego (2021).
She has participated in group exhibitions at institutions including the Americas Society, New York, USA (2024), Fondazione Prada, Venice (2023), Museo Jumex, Mexico City (2021), and M HKA, Antwerp (2019), among others. Her work has been featured in publications including Prime: Art’s Next Generation (Phaidon, 2022), Transnational Belonging and Female Agency in the Arts (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023), and Chantal Peñalosa: A Universe On The Line (ESPAC, 2024).