Sokthea Chan is a Cambodian American artist that explores themes around memory, time, and identity. He is a recent graduate from California State University-Sacramento of Spring 2025 who holds a Master of Fine Arts degree with an emphasis in painting, drawing, and installation. His works are often inspired by the natural world, Khmer diaspora, and Buddhist philosophy that speaks to living in the present, attachment and connections to forms, and the human experience of daily life. After the passing of his father at a young age, Chan learned that living is only temporary while as humans, there is so much to do in a person' s life span where he hopes sharing one another' s experiences will unravel more of the mysteries of the world.

During his childhood, Chan would often struggle to find a place of belonging with the contrast of attending grade school in the U.S. while going home to family that has many different cultural values and beliefs. To this present day, he would still feel separated from others while being curious of the many things around him and observing things such as the shifting clouds, formation of rocks, the murmuration of birds, and researching marine life that lies beneath the depths. With time and age, Chan slowly learned to accept himself as a person being true and authentic as an individual rather than trying to fit in with others. In relation to his practice as an artist, he would describe his works to be an accumulation of daily life experiences that draws to him and continues to ignite the joy of making. The imagery depicted in his works are ambiguous forms and abstracted worlds that are drawn from many different sources morphed together such as animals, natural elements, patterning of cultural wear, and textures created through a wide ray of materials with an experimental approach.

Chan is driven through a maximalist ethos to create something and explore beyond the unexpected in his artmaking. He is interested in a wide range of materials and methodologies that sparks new curiosities in his practice to bring forward new outcomes. Some of his creative processes include combining woodcut and linocut prints, collaging, woven paper, mixing natural found materials, and dense layering of paints. Chan also believes that the realm of crafts and art can be combined to create something that aligns and compliments one another. Some of his approaches to art making are at times systematic while other times are purely improvisational through conversation and dialogue between the artist and work itself. 

Through this, Chan hopes to offer the viewer an experience and pure interactions with the art. As the work can be interpreted many ways, his beliefs of searching and finding new things is one the most significant factors of the consciousness of being present as human beings that he hopes others can see through his art.