Wake Forest Magazine invited five professional photographers who are alumni to return for 48 hours. They zoomed in on the Wake Forest they want you to see.
Kristi Chan (’15)
When I think back on my time at Wake Forest, I remember it as a blur of faces, events, conversations and assignments. Remembering the way the campus recorded the seasons helps me organize my memories and place these frenzied moments in time.
I remember that being a student was often a busy, extroverted affair. But some of the most important moments I cherish from my years as an undergraduate were those times I slowed down. I stole moments of solitude in the quiet corners of campus and surrounding forest — the Reynolda and cross country trails, Davis Field.
As a studio art major, I found a second home in the studios at Scales Fine Arts Center. I felt welcome to linger there between classes, and I felt a certain sense of comfort that I didn’t feel elsewhere on campus. I learned to sit with challenging questions, listen to my intuition and channel it into the pieces I was making. It was here that I laid the foundation for what would become my career as an artist, even though I didn’t know it at the time. I learned to be comfortable in the quiet and enjoy my own company amid the studio walls and trees of Wake Forest, a skill that would buoy me through many phases of my life — a necessary practice in the face of constant pressure to produce. Thanks, capitalism.
When I was invited back to campus to shoot, I was excited to revisit some of these places that held versions of my undergraduate self. These images capture students at work, personal moments of solitude from retracing old, familiar paths and other instances of creation and reflection. 
Kristi Chan (’15) is a first-generation Chinese-Malaysian artist, writer, educator and an Art Practice MFA candidate at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work examines the material memory of the landscape and the excluded histories of the Asian American diaspora. She utilizes alternative photography, handmade paper and ceramics in her work. Recent projects have focused on the lost stories of early Chinese diaspora settlers in California and their connections to early industries such as fishing and mining. The Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, SOMArts in San Francisco and the David Brower Center in Berkeley, California, have exhibited her work. Originally from North Carolina, Chan is based in California’s Bay Area.
