Scott Artist Series 2026: Nick Dong

About this event

Scott Artist Series - Art and Art History | Colorado State University

The Scott Artist Series supports the exchange of ideas among artists from multiple disciplines, various places, and diverse backgrounds. Inspirational speakers and artists are invited to the CSU campus to share creative and innovative ideas aimed at broadening the horizons of art students. Guest artists in the series are art influencers who have national and international exposure. Their involvement with our community is critical to the long-term impact that art has on society. Alumni Shaesby Scott (’97, Art), and his wife, Catherine Scott (’98, History) established the Scott Artist Series fund. This year’s Scott Artist Series event is additionally by sponsored by the Lilla B. Morgan Fund, the Department of Art and Art History, and the Clara Hatton Gallery.

Artist Bio Nick Dong is a multidisciplinary artist whose experiential mixed-media sculptures, wearable objects, and installations combine an advanced knowledge of materials and technique with a gift for elevating an audience’s experience beyond the optical. By seamlessly integrating sophisticated engineering and metalsmithing components, supernatural movements, light, sound, and various interactive or situational strategies, Dong’s practice creates a fully immersive event, only complete once a participant’s encounter is initiated.

Dong holds a BFA in Mixed Media and Painting from Tung-Hai University in Taichung, Taiwan and an MFA in Metalsmithing in Jewelry from the University of Oregon. He has been featured in media outlets including CBS’s Evening Magazine, 7x7 magazine, KQED’s The California Report, and numerous appearances in Metalsmith magazine, which most recently highlighted Dong’s work in a June 2013 feature article by Brett Levine.

Dong’s work has swiftly gained international attention, with an exhibition record which belies the artist’s youth. Since the early 1990s his work has been shown extensively in galleries in Taiwan and throughout the United States. In 2003, Dong’s work was included in the Cheongju International Craft Biennial in South Korea; in 2008, he was one of twenty metal artists from thirteen countries selected for “Artitude 2008” at Kunstbanken Museum in Hamar, Norway.

In 2012, Dong was one of 40 artists born since 1972 chosen to appear in “40 Under 40: Craft Futures,” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington D.C. The Washington Post review of “40 under 40” noted: “Illumination comes from Nick Dong’s ‘Enlightenment Room’ installation... Dong’s room challenges the viewer to forget about traditional categories and revel in the handcrafted.“

In 2016, San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum invited Dong to exhibit his large-scale mixed-media work “Patterns from Heaven and Earth.” Dong was recognized by the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts with a solo show, “Specular Reflection,” in 2017. Dong gained even greater visibility with his 2021 solo exhibition “Divine Immersion, The Experiential Art of Nick Dong” at the USC Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, CA, and the same year participated in the exhibition “GLOW” in The Exploratorium Museum of San Francisco, CA. In 2024 Dong present "Nick Dong: 11 to 88," the inauguration exhibition of his Auspicious 88 series in the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, CA.