Artist Gaye Chan is a juggler. At any given time she has a handful of projects on the burner (some of them on the back burner, she says with a laugh), while also nurturing a next generation of artists as the chair of the University of Hawai'i's Department of Art and Art History.

She was in New York City on Nov. 9 for the opening of "Transfigurations," a group show at Sepia International, a gallery and research center that focuses on the work of Asian artists.

In the exhibition are pieces from "Historic Characters and Famous Events," Chan's ongoing series of photographic montages. Chan sticks old snapshots of "ordinary people" on illustrated plates she tears directly from "Historic Characters and Famous Events," a 10-volume set of books that was published in 1894.

Superimposed over Louis Pasteur in his library is a faded black-and-white picture of an Asian couple smiling at the camera, taken in the 1940s. And a jaunty sailor in his Navy whites, his arm around the neck of his wife or girlfriend, obscures George Washington and his mother, only the Founding Father's breeched and booted leg visible.

Chan started the project in 2000, and since 2004 it's been "on one of my back burners," says Chan. "I took up too many other projects.

"The intent of it is related to my other work," says Chan, "to look at the process of how history is created, and what are the politics and motivations behind it — who it serves, I guess."

The stories and pictures she has overlaid on "this glorious text" are of ordinary people — "people who lay outside of history, like 99.9999 percent of people in life," says Chan.

Of her more than 40 manipulated plates, about half are on view at Sepia International through Dec. 22.

The petite, wiry artist, her hair framing her face in feral waves, had a scare in the run-up to the exhibition.

"FedEx lost my entire show for two weeks, and finally found (the artwork) sitting at a station a few blocks from the gallery with half the label scraped off."

One of Chan's works has become part of daily island life — her "Eating in Public" project, done with her partner, Nandita Sharma, includes the Web site www.nomoola.com and two "free stores," one set up in the UH art building, the other in front of their Enchanted Lake home. People regularly leave and take stuff, from plants to old fans.

She is now turning her attention to a new concept using Google maps. She envisions a 160-foot-long depiction of about 200 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border superimposed onto a "worm-eaten accordion book."

"It's to look at the U.S.'s insane attempt to build a metal fence cross the entire Mexico-U.S. border and look at human migration, at the history of migration," says Chan.

"All animals move, and the work will examine how both national policy and the building of the fence is so hostile to the mobility of living things."

In the midst of a "totally insane" semester at UH ("everything lands in this crazy office, and I have to fix it"), Chan doesn't have a lot of time for her art.

"I'm very fortunate to be an artist for whom life's trials is the actual material for my work," says Chan. "For a painter who is inspired by the process of painting, if they're not painting they're not working.

"Because I'm a conceptual artist, all the things that I confront on a daily basis ... are things that will appear in my work. I'm not working but I'm always working — I consider myself very lucky that way."