How do you ask an artist to define beauty? Kristi Chan, senior studio art major, photographer, film-maker, and painter, was up to the challenge as she told tall tales —mountain tales — of life and loss and lovely things in an apropos “fireside chat” around Farrell’s decidedly synthetic fire pit, which abruptly shut off during our interview and concluded it. I’m sure Chan, an ACCIAC and art department scholar, could make a metaphor out of that — but she told stories instead of her treks to Kenya, Peru, Ecuador and Nepal, all in the last 18 months. Here’s what this vivacious explorer found on her journey through the heart of the Himalayas — and her own.
See Kristi’s blog: kristiana-chan.com
Brag about your travels: where have you been these last 18 months?
The summer of 2013, I went to Kenya and worked with the social enterprise Uhuru. They work in camps where victims from the 2007 election violence were displaced and living in tents, and we worked to build a community out of poverty.
I was still jet-lagged from Africa when I landed in Lima. I had four days in between the two trips. I worked with Krochet Kids. They teach impoverished women to create garments and products to be sold in boutiques in the United States.
I studied abroad for five months in Ecuador.
In Nepal, I was an ACCIAC scholar, and received a grant to do a documentary project on using mountain guiding to lift women out of poverty.
You’ve been to so many places. Do you feel like you’re chasing after something?
At the end of my sophomore year at Wake, I was feeling stagnant, full of sitting water, and not doing anything good and just starting to smell bad, you know?
And so I wanted to be uncomfortable, I wanted to seek some sort of fulfillment or affirmation that yes, there was more, and that I wasn’t crazy.
And when you left, what did you find?
The indigenous people, who don’t see the land as something separate. They don’t see themselves as man and nature, they see themselves as man is nature.
I grew up in Calgary, Canada at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. I grew up going to pow wows. When I came here, I was shocked that the only Native American presence in North Carolina was the Cherokee Casino. I thought, this is so sad!
Tell me about the natives.
When I was in Nepal, the natives worshipped the Himalayas; in Ecudaor, the Incans worshipped the volcanoes. Understanding that other people saw God in the mountains affirmed this belief that I see God and beauty in the mountains too.
Art, often times, is equated with beauty. What is beautiful to you?
I think the most beautiful things to me are the most raw and authentic. That harkens back to the idea of nature and natural beauty, creation; something in its rawest sense is something in its most beautiful state.
Who embodies it?
There was a girl, Laxmi, whom I met in Nepal. She got married when she was 16. Her husband left her and their two daughters with the mother-in-law. She threw acid on Lapxi, to say: you are damaged.
To know Lapxi not as a woman for whom terrible things have happened, but as the woman who cooked a meal for me on one of my last nights just because she wanted to…well, that is beauty you cannot see.
What is one thing that you wish that Nepali women knew?
That they’re valuable. Just as valuable as men. But this isn’t just a Nepali woman thing, it’s an all-woman thing.
*Article by Elena Dolman.