Chantal Peñalosa Fong was born in the small Mexican border town of Tecate, Baja California, and is the descendant of Chinese immigrants. Her works explore the liminality between borders, identity, and memory, examining narratives that fall outside dominant histories. Through this engagement with migration and otherness, she reveals the stories and sites that exist in the in-between—where boundaries blur and forgotten histories resurface.

This series of diptychs records the subtle shifts in cloud formations that happen in the time it takes for Peñalosa Fong to cross the border from the United States into Mexico. In the series, the shortest trip across the border is around 8 minutes. Traveling from one political landscape to another, where the border itself is the subject of geopolitical strife between nations, the clouds gently float without regard for these divisions. Peñalosa Fong highlights how human-made borders become meaningless in the face of natural processes. The clouds drift seamlessly across California and Mexico alike, revealing no trace of the political boundary below. In this work, she turns the border into a space of liminality. Rather than illustrating loss, the series gestures toward transformation through time. As the clouds dissipate or expand, they witness the terrain below and traverse these rigid territorial divisions, utterly unaware of the politically tumultuous landscape they pass over.