Artist and alumna Eva Lin Fahey’s paintings, on view at the Fine Arts Center’s Augusta Savage Gallery, capture personal mythologies. 

Through striking paintings and mixed media works, artist Eva Lin Fahey ’18 tells personal stories about identity, family, and belonging.  

Her latest exhibit, Your Ghost Haunts My Shores, is on view at the Fine Arts Center’s Augusta Savage Gallery from April 4 to May 9. The collection reflects on her experience as a transracial adoptee and explores her feelings of loss and connection.

Born in Jingmen, China, during the One Child Policy, Fahey was adopted and became a U.S. citizen at age three. She is one of more than a quarter million children adopted internationally from China.  

Now a visual artist with a studio in Florence, Mass., Fahey earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from UMass Amherst in 2018. Her work explores what it means to be caught between two cultures, one she was born into and another in which she was raised.  

“Creating narratives that are shared by marginalized communities or within the Chinese adoptee diaspora is super important. To connect with other people through this experience and think about how we resist dominant narratives, politically and culturally, that’s the function of art. Art allows us to come out of those spaces and resist.” 

EVA LIN FAHEY ’18, VISUAL ARTIST

The works in Your Ghost Haunts My Shores feature two key symbols: oceans and ghosts.  

“I don’t think of my work as engaging in ghosts in the sense of the occult or in a spooky way, but I think of ghosts as a representation of what’s missing,” Fahey says. “The ghost is this shape-shifting presence that is present throughout all my work.”  

While the ocean represents the physical and emotional distance between Fahey and her birthplace, she says ghosts symbolize her birth family, her ancestors, her culture, and even herself.

“In creating these mythologies and paintings, it’s a form of being alive. It’s my physical mark making,” Fahey says. “These paintings are proving my existence.”  

Fahey is currently a Master of Fine Arts student at Clark University and was named a 2025 Massachusetts Fellow at The Studios at MASS MoCA. Her work was featured in AGNI’s Afterlives: An AGNI Portfolio of Asian Adoptee Diaspora Writing and is part of the UMass Amherst collection.  

Support the Fine Arts Center and learn more about Your Ghost Haunts My Shores, on view now through May 9, 2025 at the Augusta Savage Gallery in New Africa House at UMass Amherst.