Each season, Music@Menlo invites a distinguished visual artist to exhibit a selection of their work throughout the festival and showcases their work in the festival’s publications. The 2025 visual artist is Mark Chen. Mark centers his practice on photography. He invents and repurposes tools as he pushes media boundaries, devising new processes that make possible the executions of his concepts. For his latest series, Pilgrimage of Light, which explores the mysterious coexistence of the universe, earth, and people, Mark travels to hard-to-reach wilderness to project galactic images, altering landscapes while photographing them. The production of this series received a boost from his residency at Grand Canyon National Park in 2023 and 2024. In 2025, Pilgrimage of Light will be shown in International Art and Science Museum, Texas, and featured in National Geographic Magazine’s March 2025 issue.

Read Mark Chen Bio