fifi rae
©2024
about
Bio
Fifi Rae is a collector of names, wonders, and gossip. Her work spans from large-scale installations to intimate artist’s books experimenting with drawing, projection, photography, printmaking, and design. She often investigates her transracial adoption through childhood memories, family photos, public archives, and ghosts as metaphors. Influenced by patterns, text, glitches, translation in language and media, graffiti, photos IDs, and other remnants of human presence, she resists the narrative of solely loss in archival histories of adoption, displacement, and migration. She uses digital and physical intervention and glitches as opportunities for imagination, reinvention, and gain. She also questions the obsession to prove one’s existence, reclaim a space, and make a space into a place. Temporary yet stubborn, her presence will forever be rendered as a layer of blue ink in the palimpsest of human foot and fingerprints before or a floating ghost stuck in the in-between, always almost here. She hopes that her work will survive her, as art always does.
Born in 2003 in Nanjing, China, and raised in Los Angeles, CA, she received a B.A. in Art Practice and a minor in Art History from the University of California, Berkeley in 2025. Her work has been included in various exhibitions, such as the Worth Ryder Art Gallery, Berkeley, CA, and the Triton Museum of Art, Santa Clara, CA. She has collaborated on a public mural in Downtown Berkeley, commissioned by the Downtown Berkeley Association and participated in the Advanced Honors and Critique Program at UC Berkeley. She has won 1st place in the 2025 Lyon Prize in Photography from the College of Environmental Design and an Art Practice Certificate of Excellence in Drawing, a graduation award from the Art Department at UC Berkeley. During the summer of 2025, she interned at the INOW Program in Kamikatsu, Japan and co-leading a creative project about the intersection of art, sustainability, community, cycles, and translation. She currently resides and works in the Bay Area, CA.