Lucky Knot Arts Pop-Up: Self-Portraiture as Self Love with Mel Taing
In this photography & collaging event, participants are invited to celebrate themselves through self-portraits and an opportunity to print their images for a collaging and journaling activity centered on self-love. This art-making activity is designed for AANHPI (Asian American, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander) folx to shine a light on their identities and learn the healing powers of taking representation into their own hands with photographer and community artist Mel Taing.
About Lucky Knot Arts:
The vision for Lucky Knot Arts is to sustain a home base where AANHPIs (including multigenerational, multiracial, and transracially adopted folks) can take up space, create together, and celebrate authentically.
About Mel Taing:
Mel Taing (she/her) is a Cambodian American photographer, community artist, and educator. Mel specializes in creative portraiture that captures the vibrance, radiance, and joy of the intersecting communities in her life. Her process is deeply collaborative and focuses on co-creating new, shared visions that become a mirror for her subjects to witness themselves. As a child of Cambodian refugees, she is deeply interested in the resilience that is created through community. Her portrait sessions are healing in action – honoring QTDBIPOC+ (Queer, Trans, Disabled, Black, Indigenous, People of Color) folx and creating spaces for us to play, witness, and celebrate our truest selves. Mel believes that resilience does not always need to center the pain experienced but rather the ways in which we seek joy.
Beyond her portraiture practice, Mel is currently an educator at the Harvard Ed Portal Artist Pipeline Program, a lead community engagement artist for the Boston Chinatown Cultural Plan, and a freelance photographer documenting artists and arts exhibitions.
