Kristiana Chan and Héctor Muñoz-Guzmán are part of the Fifty-Sixth Annual UC Berkeley MFA Exhibition. Nearing the end of the two-year program, Chan and Muñoz-Guzmán reflect on their time here at Berkeley and share their artistic approaches.
Berkeley’s Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A.) program is an intimate and interdisciplinary affair. With only six graduating students each year, students grow through art studio work and academic seminars, expanding their perspectives as artists.
Shaped by the people she has learned from and with, from faculty members to friends across multiple disciplines, Chan’s time as a student allowed her to deepen her practice.“Having the privilege of time and space, and access to resources has really allowed me to ask bigger questions, make bigger work, and dive into the research that drives my practice,” Chan said.
During her M.F.A. Chan received a lot of thoughtful feedback, which she describes as a rare resource, and difficult to encounter outside of an academic setting. She deepened her artistic practice by learning new techniques, expanding her material reach and technical skills, receiving mentorship from faculty members, and studio visits from visiting artists.
Growth also took place outside her studio. Chan embraced the academic environment and fed her curiosity through seminars, conversations, and lectures with visiting artists and scholars, which sharpened her criticality. It was a positive feedback loop; this honed criticality is now applied to her art, where she asks more nuanced questions and dives deeper into the research that fuels her practice. Chan reflects, “These have been two of the most challenging years of my career, but were also two of the most joyful and fulfilling ones!”
On the bottom: An arrangement of oyster shells, molds, and latex casts, one of many material experiments found in her studio.
Chan’s work explores questions of survival, adaptation, evolution, and speculations, drawing her visual references from the ocean, specifically the intertidal zone. In this space where the land meets the sea, Chan studies this transitional zone as a site of violence, change, and the literal (and littoral) space between two realms. “I’m interested in material conversations, transformations, and histories, thinking about my studio as a place where a kind of alchemy can happen when all these things collide,” they say.
This connection to the ocean is also deeply personal for Chan—an avid surfer and freediver. “I always feel more creatively refreshed after spending time in the ocean. Immersing my body in cold seawater, navigating its conditions safely always quiets my brain and reconnects me to a corporeal experience,” Chan explains. Graduate school is a period of continuous productivity and growth, and it is easy to get creatively burnt out, especially when Chan’s main medium requires a great deal of physicality, from shaping clay to blacksmithing metal, and molding concrete. “Art making and building in ceramic is such an embodied experience that I try to also make sure to balance that with some kind of play outside,” she says. Chan emphasizes the importance of resting, thinking, and dreaming within her practice, and part of that process involves foraging mushrooms with her dog and returning to her place of inspiration, the ocean, to surf.
For Muñoz-Guzmán, his growth as an artist came with slowing down. “I’ve learned to take greater care with subtle details and to sit longer with a piece. When I was younger, I felt pressure to constantly produce—to prove to the art world that I was moving forward. Now, at 26, I find more joy and clarity in patience. I trust that depth matters more than speed.”
In Muñoz-Guzmán’s experience, being at Berkeley has reframed what knowledge and research can look like, especially within his art practice. “During my time here, I’ve learned that research can take many forms,” he says. “As an artist, my lived experiences are research. Everything that informs and inspires the work can be framed as a form of research,” Muñoz-Guzmán said.
In the studio, Muñoz-Guzmán allows ideas to come to him naturally and instinctively. His art centers on the questions of representation and power, asking how working-class and Mexican people have been portrayed, and how gender roles within Mexican families have shaped the depiction of women in Chicano painting. Additionally, he thinks about the painting itself, questioning whether the painting is acting as a portal to another realm or an effort of resistance within this realm.
To anybody trying to find their voice, Muñoz-Guzmán advises not letting others’ opinions determine your direction. “Learn to trust yourself—even if you’re in a room full of people who disagree. Your voice strengthens when you stand by it.”
This month, Chan and Muñoz-Guzmán, along with the graduating M.F.A. class, will be on display at the 56th Annual UC Berkeley Master of Fine Arts Exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), from May 13 to July 26, 2026. To hear the artists discuss their work in greater depth, tickets to the MFA Artists’ Talk on May 15 are available on BAMPFA’s website.
Photo Credit: Kristiana Chan 莊礼恩 and Héctor Muñoz-Guzmán
