_About Me

Hi! My name is Megan Chao and I am a 20 year old artist American-born Taiwanese artist majoring in Digital Media Art and minoring in Asian Studies at San Jose State University.
I am passionate about design and layout composition and am always looking to expand my skills. I specialize in Adobe Creative Suite as well as artistic direction but am currently working on improving my 3D rendering abilities as well as UX and UI web design. My intention is to bring innovative and aesthetic design to a brand. Please reach out!

Artist Statement

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My name is Megan Chao and I am an American-born Taiwanese artist that studies at San Jose State University. I hope to pursue my degree in Digital Media Art as I love to create aesthetic compositions and provocative pieces. My work expands across several mediums such as video, video projection, coding languages such as HTML, CSS, and JAVA, as well as different Adobe Creative Suite programs. I prefer to work with Photoshop, InDesign, Premiere Pro, and Illustrator, however, I also dabble with After Effects and Lightroom. I am currently working on expanding my knowledge of 3D rendering utilizing Blender as well as exploring concepts of Augmented Reality.
Previously only working with fine art and sculpture, my journey of digital media arts has enabled me to create pieces that I could have previously never imagined. My first exploration with digital media art began with learning Photoshop. There, I have studied layout design through composition, blending styles, and photo editing. My pieces, “Head in the Clouds”, “The Quarantine Series”, and “_floss” all display my Photoshop knowledge through their content variety. Illustrator has allowed me to create interesting graphics that I incorporate daily in my own work. Premiere Pro has enabled me to learn and delve into video art. My pieces “Influencer” and “Impression” allowed me to use Premiere Pro to graphically edit the video in an aesthetic type manner as well as color correct the videos and adjust the lightning to create different moods. Learning HTML, CSS and Java was originally very tough for me. I was new to coding and working with Processing was especially difficult. Although it was initially challenging, the art it created was entirely new and amazing to me. I never imagined that code was able to create such vibrant and unique art pieces.
With my knowledge of art from the several classes I have taken at San Jose State University, I hope to pursue a career in artistic direction and design. I strive to create innovative pieces that also cater to a brand's direction in order to draw in new customers as well as incentivize old customers to stay. A lot of my work touches upon subjects relevant to the current age. For example, “The Quarantine Series” was a collection of self-portrait images that represent the different stages of quarantine due to COVID-19. “Heritage” was a video installation project that discusses the subject of cultural disconnection that many American-born children face. I would love to work more with Augmented Reality art as I believe having such an interactive art display would be more exciting and inclusive to all audiences.
My journey as a digital artist is only growing as I strive to learn more programs and develop my artistic skills. Digital media art has been an amazing outlet for me to express myself creatively as well as discuss topics that are important to me through different artworks. I look forward to taking even more upper-division classes at San Jose State University that allows me to enhance my career.