CYCLE 2
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FALL/WINTER 2025 FELLOWS
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CYCLE 2 . * FALL/WINTER 2025 FELLOWS . *
SEBASTIAN LOO
Sebastian Loo (b. Los Angeles, 1996) is an LA-based installation artist working primarily with ink, colors, and Chinese Xuan rice paper. As a queer, Chinese American, Loo’s work ultimately seeks hybridity of: Eastern and Western culture, contemporary and ancient perspectives, religious and secular practices, the natural and artificial. Their practice ultimately aims at personal transformation and systems change, utilizing pointillism and paper cut-out techniques to question the origin stories that shape our worldview. Through these methods, Loo creates works that transcend boundaries, inviting viewers into a space of interconnectedness where all things—matter, icon, or system—exist beyond categorization and are united within a field of unconditional relationship.
Drawing from both “real” and mythological imagery, Loo’s work connects disparate origins. He engages deeply with the idea that meaning and understanding are born from narrative and myth, examining how foundational stories shape human actions and beliefs. By repurposing canonized motifs such as gods, scientific processes, and architectures, Loo creates immersive paintings that allow space for reflection and questioning. He calls his pieces “painted assemblages” since their bodies contain a range of subjects and dynamics, as in multifaceted systems alone. Coming together as hanging installations rather than wall-fixed paintings, his floating pieces respond to each other as if they were societal or cosmic microcosms playing out global dialogues. These suspended mythologies ultimately serve as portals, inviting an essential awareness for all sentient beings to consider the narratives that govern existence.
RINO KODAMA
Currently based in Albion, California, I am a second generation Japanese American artist and writer. Where my practice begins with poetry to explore themes of grief and transformation, they merge into life size ceramic sculptures, a celebration of the more than human world, in constant relationship and learning from the regenerative life all around us. Collaborating with the elements of fire and earth, I use repetitive coil building techniques, where clay becomes a medium for protection, somatic processing, ritual, and celebration. My clay vessels are extensions of my genderqueer body, malleable, undergoing stages of transformation, the way clay goes from its original to fired form. My earliest collaborations are with my mother, Tomoko Kodama, a gardener and florist who regularly creates arrangements for the vessels I create, and who was the first person who showed me the importance of planting and nurturing beauty in our lives. Outside of my ceramic practice, I find joy in working with other queer and trans artists searching and creating spaces of belonging. I am a co-editor of Letters to Home: Art and Writing by LGBTQ+ Nikkei and Allies, an anthology of works by Japanese American queer and trans folks and their families, on ways they have co-constructed community.
Kodama holds a BA from UCLA, and most recently attended the inaugural session of Schools of Salmon Creek, co-creating and learning with 5 other artists on Pomo land. They recently completed their School Guide position at Salmon Creek, stewarding the next cohort of artists to experiment and develop a connection to their bodies, land, practice, and each other. Their first co-curated exhibition with Dav Bell, Natural Death, is open at the Mendocino Art Center until February 9th, 2026. Kodama is currently learning about wood firing at Cider Creek Collective.
JON CHEN
Jon Chen is an artist and “Quantum Friend” whose practice challenges separations between technology, humanity, and nature. Their work seeks pathways toward harmonious co-existence in a moment defined by climate crisis, disconnection, and apathy. Rooted in wonder, they treat play as a radical tool for building toward these futures.
Their ongoing exploration, ANY, is a digital creative ecosystem that oscillates between platform, tool, and Trojan-horse artist collective—aimed at liberating 21st-century creative tools and human attention to support dreaming and world-building that flows between the individual and collective.
Grafted onto this is an interconnected web of modular “earthen-ware” sculptures grounded in a Chinese American mythopoetic lineage and reaching toward an emergent, decolonized U.S. mythos inspired by indigenous reclamation—recentering ourselves within an already-present, ever-shifting tapestry of cultural constellations guided by a wind older than memory.
Influenced by the 2000s internet, fantasy and sci-fi RPG video games, and the mysteries of both micro and macro natural worlds, Jon’s work cultivates language, structures, and stories capable of holding our growing planetary and technological complexity. Their practice is balanced by an embodied knowing that brings coherence and clarity to these turbulent waters.
Jon holds a BFA in Sculpture with a concentration in CTC (Computation, Technology, and Culture) from the Rhode Island School of Design. Their collaborative work has explored historical justice, Black cultural archives, immersive story-telling, ecological interaction design, and well-being through creative play, with contributions to the Emmett Till Memory Project, The Black Press @ 200, NYT R&D Team, Restor.eco, and Culture Therapy. Together, these and many other experiences have taught them that grief and joy often share the same flame.
At heart, they remain a sun-kissed, whimsical spirit, tending a Mango Tree, where she plays beside and he dreams beneath, all held gently by the wisdom of the moon.
JENN BAN
Jenn Ban (she/they) is a Mother, Filipinx-American multidisciplinary artist, Reiki master-teacher, tattoo artist, world builder and cultural-community organizer currently living in San Francisco. They're artwork focuses on the themes of nature, self evolution and soul transcendence through exploration of art, healing, and community organizing. Their work spans from tattoos, soft-sculptures, paintings, film, soundscapes, workshops, and curation.
Jenn’s work has been featured in the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and in galleries across the Bay Area, Florida, Europe, and the Philippines. They're the co-founder and Community Arts Director of Bituin Studio, a Filipinx-inspired Body Art shop, Art Gallery, and Community Space located in San Francisco's Filipino Historical District (SOMA).
In this residency, Jenn is exploring the becoming of motherhood with her baby, Amansi Jude “Juju”. As a mother and living artist, Jenn’s practice incorporates ways of being with Juju. How mother and child are one and the remembrance that children can co-exist in our day to day living.
■ Jenn Ban - @jenn.ban
■ Reiki Tattoo Ceremony - tattoo page @sacredskinadornments
■ Bituin Studio - Tattoo Shop @bituinstudio