Angela Chen 陳勇氣 (she/her) is a Taiwanese-American photo-based artist, writer, and educator from the ethnoburbs of the San Gabriel Valley, California. Her work combines autobiographical texts, photographs, and archival documents to explore the immigrant experience, the process of assimilation, and how we develop a relationship to place. Angela is a graduate of the Yale School of Art, where she was an Alice Kimball Traveling Fellow and an Art and Social Justice Grantee. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the Stamps School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan. She taught previously at Rice University and New York University.
(author photo: Lorena Molina)
After School
by Angela Chen
8.5 x 11, 100 pgs., $25
ISBN 978-1-962365-08-6
Forthcoming in 2026.
​​​In After School, Angela Chen unpacks the culture of after school tutoring centers in predominantly East Asian communities in the San Gabriel Valley, CA. Known as buxiban in Chinese, hagwon in Korean, and juku in Japanese, these after schools are referred to colloquially as cram schools and by scholars as shadow education. But in the US, after schools also provide essential childcare services to busy parents, many of whom are new immigrants. Despite the outsize role they play in Asian American communities, the general public knows very little about them. Through autobiographical texts, photographs, and xeroxed collages, Chen recounts how her parents, new immigrants from Taiwan, began their after school business and considers the relationship between this educational ecosystem and the myth of American meritocracy.