"When He's In His Groove, He's Obviously Doing Something Very Right" ~ On The Art of Albert Chong.

As we sully rivers and tides, burn woodlands, encroach increasingly on wilderness, the delicate relationship of our humanity to a wider, cosmic landscape is manifest. Recently, I became friends with a wonderful artist. Albert Chong's photographs are eminently pertinent in chaotic times. They inhabit a place deep in the intoxication of being alive. We need their revelations equally as much as we need those of science, for their quest for truth is one-and-the-same.

While art can be anything, even raising a black fist in protest, Chong's photographs speak in a gentler voice that is louder than guns. His images carry the sweet union of human living with the light of a star and the flight of a honey bee. Boundaries overlap. Separations dissolve. Self Portrait With Eggs uses the intimacy of Chong's own body, lowering the veil. With the ease of a Zen master, Chong proclaims the right of all to embrace non-duality, the veracity of existence. We are many things at once, his art whispers - lyrical and staccato, soft and powerful, white and dark, male and female, fierce and serene, pacifist and warrior, lover and beloved, emergence and decay, and everything in between in the cycle from birth to death. Fused to the wild and silky universe that surrounds us, we were never meant to be separated from its majesty.

"I believe deeply in the sacredness of life," Albert Chong says. "I love the natural world, and have a hunger to understand it as profoundly as I can." To witness Albert Chong's uniquely dazzling art is to experience an affirmation of freedom, personal and collective freedom, freedom centered in a generosity, respect, and tenderness toward all being that only genuine liberty brings. To photograph, to paint, to write, to speak, to make art of any kind proclaims and defends who we are. We've never needed it more than we need it now.

Self Portrait With Eggs, 1987. Albert Chong

Miss Peggy, 2016. Albert Chong.

Dreaming Seas, 1998. Albert Chong.

Gaia, 2004. Albert Chong.

When I met Albert Chong, I felt an immediate affinity for his photography. As a northern New Mexico painter, photographer and writer living on the dramatic High Road to Taos north of Santa Fe, I am immersed in a primal world of dreams. Mountains, fields, forest, air, water, geology, animal creatures and human history stretching back thousands of years combine in a spell-binding vision beautiful beyond words. Each mesa, tree, flower, meadow and cloud reverberates with a harmony of its own, as if inhabited by the mystical energy of gods. Memory, released in the faint murmur of a distant river, or the sight of a great horned owl perched at dusk on a post invites renewed awareness grounded in space-time. “Be here now,” everything susurrates. “Discover the sky from the sky, discover the blade of grass from the blade of grass. Know your country, not from the perspective of rational, structured intelligence, what we think we already understand, but as wild beasts know their country, from an open and connected brain, as hot, flowing and flexible as the magma within Earth herself.”

As we navigate the terror of 2020 under COVID-19 pandemic, I am increasingly convinced that the world needs the connecting balm of art, as well as artists who embrace a creative approach such as that of Jada Griffin’s and Albert Chong's. As it should be, our work is unique to its maker, and yet, as the ecosystems of our Earth sink more and more to a point of no return, we bear powerful equal witness to a small blue planet that is found no where else in the solar system. We’ve never needed this witness more than we need it now.

My Pojoaque, November, 2020. Jada Griffin

Words: Jada Griffin

See more Albert Chong art HERE