Mitchell Poon
printmaking MFA
Rhode Island School of Design
Specialisms: Fine Art / Printmaking / Photography
Location: New York, United States
Mitchell Poon
First Name: Mitchell
Last Name: Poon
Specialisms: Fine Art / Printmaking / Photography
Sectors:
My Location: New York, United States
University / College: Rhode Island School of Design
Course / Program Title: printmaking MFA
About
Mitchell Poon (b. Brooklyn, New York) is an artist working primarily with drawing, printmaking, photography, installation, and the book arts. He is inspired by his experience growing up a third generation Chinese American, a personal mythology, Chinese symbolism and numerology, and his family’s archive. His work investigates the intersections between his Chinese and American identities and explores themes of temporality, longing, grief, speculation, and mortality. He holds a BA in Economics and a minor in Fine Arts from Cornell University. He first learned lithography and began printmaking there, and has since studied printmaking at other institutions such as the Manhattan Graphics Center and the School of Visual Arts. His work has been exhibited at the RISD Museum (Providence, RI), Remarque Printshop (Albuquerque, NM), and the Menino Arts Center (Boston, MA). He has also been featured online in the publication Asian Art Contemporary. He earned his MFA in Printmaking at Rhode Island School of Design in 2026, and is currently researching tessellations, the intersection between sculpture and printmaking, and the decontextualization of imagery.
Through You I Will Feel is an installation exploring my family’s archive and my relationship with my ancestral heritage. An abstracted simulation of my childhood home’s dining room, it examines how revisiting the family archive can reveal new information not only about the past, but also about the present and the future. The installation consists of five works which integrate printmaking and print-adjacent processes: a set of four lithographic prints, cyanotype and natural toning on fabric, inkjet-printing on shrink plastic, UV dye-printing on polymer clay tiles, and digitally printed wallpaper. The title refers to the last lines of a poem my father wrote shortly before he passed in which he encourages us to live on in his stead. It serves not only as a reminder that he lives on through us, but that through the practice of art making and examining the archive, we can connect with something greater than ourselves.
Competitions
