Albert Chong
b. 1958, Kingston, Jamaica
The Buddha, 1998
Pigment print on canvas
Courtesy the artist

As an extended part of Albert Chong’s early photographic self-portrait series from 1979 to 1985, Buddha explores the artist’s Jamaican diasporic identity shaped by a long history of colonialism, slavery, and Western imperialism. Characteristic of this series, Buddha opens a fabulated space for the artist’s displaced Afro-Asian ancestry, stitching invented mystical traditions with specific elements of Jamaican culture, such as the Rastafarian religious, spiritual, and cosmological system.