Clifford Pun

Clifford Pun is an artist, photographer, and designer. His body of work is about his “Asianicity,” a drag masquerade of staged, self-portraits that explore ideas of persona, identity, sexuality, gender, and race. He has exhibited his work at Aljira: a Center for Contemporary Art in New Jersey, Krause Gallery in New York City, the Fowler-Kellogg Art Center at Chautauqua Institution, Sheppard Fine Arts Gallery at the University of Nevada, Reno, Mills Gallery at the Boston Center for the Arts, Avenue 50 Studio in Los Angeles, and Human Resources in Los Angeles. He is currently Senior Coordinator at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California at the Hoffmitz Milken Center for Typography, an interdisciplinary department at ArtCenter dedicated solely to the Typographic field.

In addition to his own art practice, Clifford has worked for esteemed artists in contemporary art. In 2011, Clifford was a production artist for Thomas Demand’s photograph “Control Room” which was a 1:1 scale model—constructed entirely out of paper—of the control room at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant damaged by the 2011 Tohuku earthquake. In Ming Wong’s project “Making Chinatown,” Wong re-created scenes from the 1974 film “Chinatown” directed by Roman Polanski. Clifford acted as Wong’s body double, and the videos were exhibited at REDCAT: The Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater in 2012. More recently, Clifford had the opportunity to volunteer for the legendary Chicana photographer Laura Aguilar in 2017, and has been a performer in Harry Gamboa, Jr.’s projects “The Sixth Expanse” and the Getty Artist Program “See What You Mean.”

Clifford has presented his work at the 2008 and 2019 Society for Photographic Education West chapter conferences, and the Queer Art Caucus at the 2010 College Art Association national conference in New York City. He was the recipient of a California Relief Fund for Artists and Cultural Practitioners grant from the California Arts Council during the 2020 pandemic. Clifford was a participant in the 2021 Chautauqua School of Art residency program.

Clifford completed his MFA in Photography and Media at the California Institute of the Arts in 2011 and his BFA at San Jose State University in 2008.­­ He currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California.