ESSAY
Chang Yoong Chia: Second Life
By Beverly Yong
The exhibition Chang Yoong Chia: Second Life explores an artist’s practice through a selection of his works made over the past twenty or so years.
As you enter the exhibition gallery, you confront two portraits of the artist. One is a black and white oil painting in which the artist’s face is made up of the contours and features of a landscape. The other is made from the wings of termites. Under this, an eggshell mounted on clockwork ticks round, painted with a story cycle of a man, two women, and a flight of crows.
From these first encounters, we find clues to important elements in Chang Yoong Chia’s approach to making art. We see he uses himself as a site for imagining. We see that he is interested in how different materials have the potential to transform and be transformed. We see that he is interested in telling stories.
The exhibition display, conceived by a team of three curators, presents three different faces of Chang’s practice. The works described above form part of “Flora and Fauna”, a room of oil paintings, painted objects and assemblages in black and white. 1 This is a deeply personal, fantastical realm where a man and a woman adventure among animals, plants and worldly phenomena, and strange new creatures and stories emerge from discarded shells, hair and bones.
The adjacent room is one of many different colours, materials and textures. In “The World is Flat”, there are self-portraits in monoprint, at turns playful, macabre and grotesque, among other early experiments with paper and fabric. There are delicately painted “narratives” reinterpreting the decorative motifs on sets of ceramic spoons and dishes, and leaves carefully cut out and painted to relate a love story. There are collages fabricated entirely of postage stamps and their fragments, reimagining a map of the world and scenes from global and local history.
Just outside the gallery space hangs a large white quilt of portraits embroidered in black thread. Video documentation and text relate how Chang has been putting together the quilt, sitting in public places stitching embroideries based on photographs from newspaper obituaries, and conducting workshops where others embroider images of loved ones who have passed away. This ongoing work is the focus of “Quilt of the Dead”. Met with this project on the passing of life, we are prompted to reflect on the exhibition’s title theme. 2
“Second Life” comes from Chang’s concept of renewing discarded materials which once held life by transforming them into artworks. 3 It may also suggest a way of thinking about his approach as a whole, as an artist who uses art as an imaginative and transformative force, and as a means of storytelling.
By gently unpacking the different “faces” of Chang’s practice and exploring how works across the exhibition relate to one another, we discover something about Chang’s processes and motivation, and in turn what kinds of meaning we may draw from his practice.
1. “Flora and Fauna” includes selected paintings and objects from an ongoing series of the same name (since 2003), but also related works using imagery from the natural world such as paintings from the exhibition Body of Water shown in Tokyo in 2016, and installations and objects made as part of his Second-AIR residency in Sapporo in 2017.
2. The quilt and related documentation are shown alongside The Family (2004), an early painting related to the death of Chang’s grandmother, and an interview with the artist during his Second-AIR residency in Sapporo. There is also a comic strip Chang produced about his memories of Lunar Peaks, a public sculpture by late national laureate Syed Ahmad Jamal, and the story of its demolition, in support of a joint protest in 2016 by the local visual arts community, speaking out for the significance of art as part of collective memory.
3. Chang talks about giving objects a “second life” to Taiga Kobayashi, who made the video of the above-mentioned Second-AIR interview. Teoh Ming Wah introduces the term “second life” as a “vital experiential idea” in ‘Jenesys Programmes: Artworks created during artist residency at S-Air, Sapporo, Japan’, Chang Yoong Chia: The 2nd Seven Years: Quilt of the Dead, Flora & Fauna IV, Narratives, Kuala Lumpur 2009, p. 15.
A Flat, Black and White World, with Shadows
The world of Chang’s art is principally flat. Trained as a painter, painting continues to make up the larger part of his output, and its basic function of creating two-dimensional forms, or images, seems to be a ruling principle of all his art-making. Teoh Ming Wah points out that, even when he is working with a three-dimensional object or installation, he treats or “sees” them two-dimensionally. 4
Chang has said that he comes to painting with very little baggage 5 and, while Western oil painting traditions have provided lessons and inspiration, his interest is in building his own painterly language not tied to a discourse claimed by others far away from where he comes from. This freedom demands a certain clarity, and Chang takes care to approach art-making from its rudiments throughout his practice.
In oil, Chang paints exclusively in black and white as these are all that are necessary for creating two-dimensional form. From here there is space to explore the language of imagery to create an imaginary world anew on blank canvas, the world of his ongoing Flora and Fauna series. Chang goes as far as trying to imagine colour in black and white in the paintings Red, Yellow and Blue (2009). 6 Where there is colour in Chang’s works, this almost always comes from or responds to existing colours of their materials – the colours of stamps, or on household ceramics.
Colours are used as crude signifiers for race, community and nationhood in the early Yellow-Skinned Song series (1996) where Chang experimented briefly with Chinese ink (combining this with symbolically “cleansing” fabric detergent). Ultimately, however, it is the black and white of Chinese ink painting, representing positive and negative space, that he relates to, and in which he finds a tenuous link to an artistic tradition closer to his cultural identity (but one he remains outside of).
Positive and negative space creates room for play in Chang’s practice. He began to make monoprints in the 1990s because he liked the element of reversal and surprise involved in printing. 7 Since the images are usually self-portrait-based, the process invited the possibility of discovering something new about himself.
Towards the end of the fourth Flora and Fauna series, Chang made Shadow of Flora and Fauna (2009), assembling colourful toy animals and trees to create his self-portrait in shadow; 8 and when he was completing work on the collages for Immortal Beloved (2013), he cut skulls from images of world leaders on stamps, presenting them as a gallery of tiny deathly silhouettes in Shadow of Great Men. This kind of shadow play is further developed in The Botany of Desire (2012), which is presented like wayang kulit against a screen lit from behind, the cut-out leaves painted in colour on the reverse, which in a traditional wayang kulit performance would only be seen by the dalang, or puppeteer.
This curiosity about the other, perhaps hidden or naked, side of images and objects and what they represent, is an undercurrent to Chang’s process, keeping a space open for alternative possibilities.
4. In a curatorial team discussion, 11 September 2018. Teoh has done much to document and articulate vital aspects of Chang’s practice, often acting as collaborator and curator for his exhibitions and writing on his work.
5. During an artist talk on 24 March 2018, facilitated by Lee Weng Choy during Chang’s solo exhibition, How Are You? I Am Well at A+ Works of Art, Kuala Lumpur.
6. Laura Fan discusses these paintings exploring “what might make colour colour” in ‘Finding Magic in the Mundane’, in Chang Yoong Chia: The 2nd Seven Years.
7. These monoprints were made using just a sheet of glass, printing ink, turpentine and paper.
8. Chang seems to play off the works of British artists Tim Noble and Sue Webster, who have used found materials such as trash and taxidermy animals to create their self-portraits in shadow.
Material and Labour
For Chang, the starting point of an artwork is his choice of material, which guides the process of its making, informs and shapes its subject matter, and dictates its form. Every material holds a significance and story of its own beyond its physical potential, and there is always a personal point of connection between the artist and his choice of material.
He chooses to paint only in oils for their connection to alchemy. 9 They belong to a world of magic while, say, acrylics, are a byproduct of our world of plastics. He chooses lamp-black, being made from burnt organic matter, and titanium white, for its low toxicity, as materials for creating his painted world. 10 They are material derived from the earth for re-imagining it as the artist’s inner realm.
Outside of painting on canvas, Chang seeks out materials that connect him to a place or that play a part in his own life and story. They are a form of souvenir, natural or cultural objects of personal significance – ceramic plates that are family heirlooms, a collection of postage stamps begun during primary school, sea shells and leaves collected during residencies in Hokkaido, Yogyakarta, Bangalore. They are objects discovered in and collected from the real world, each embedded with their own stories of places and times to be expanded on and reinterpreted.
Making art exacts for Chang a high level of commitment to its labour, which we can see in the extraordinary detail of his paintings, although each of his materials makes its own set of demands. In his exhibition statement for The World is Flat, Chang talks about the work of collecting thousands of stamps, removing them from envelopes, sorting them out, cutting out fragments, and gluing the pieces together to make new images as a test of physical and mental endurance, and of the process as a “personal defiance against the high speed and wasteful industrialised society we live in”. 11
Between October 2003 and May 2004, Chang performed Quilt of the Dead 34 times in different, mostly public, places, usually for eight hours – the length of a normal working day. When I asked him how he came to the idea of embroidery for this project, he told me a fairytale recalled from childhood in which a princess takes on the task of stitching seven shirts from weeds and webs to break a spell over her seven older brothers who have been turned into swans. For seven years, she is not allowed to speak while she stitches, and continues in silence even when she is accused of being a witch and sent to be burnt at the stake.
9. Chang talks about his use of oil, and the influence of James Elkins’s book What Painting Is, which describes painting as being similar to alchemy, in Teoh Ming Wah, ‘Jenesys Programmes: Artworks created during artist residency at S-Air, Sapporo, Japan’ in,Chang Yoong Chia: The 2nd Seven Years, pp. 14-15.
10. Artist’s talk, 24 March 2018, A+ Works of Art, Kuala Lumpur.
11. Artist statement, Chang Yoong Chia: The World is Flat, Singapore: Richard Koh Fine Art 2011.
Man and nature
In fairytales, humans and animals are equal characters, humans often change into animals, and animals are the characters that hold magical powers and symbolic weight. They are treated similarly in Chang’s work.
In Chang’s early monoprints, the naked figure of the artist is often part animal part human, and this exploration of metamorphosis and hybridity can be seen as an investigation of the beasts within or a way of imagining himself beyond himself.
In Flora and Fauna, the natural world, in its details, textures and rhythms, provides the structure and subject matter for building the vision of an inner realm. The plants and animals come from observation, memory, fairytale and myth to create a sort of Eden from which humankind was never expelled, where the figures of the artist and his heroine roam freely, probing the landscape, playing at different roles, finding each other. It is an otherworld to real and present experience which offers a psychological retreat and repository for sorting out thoughts, difficulties, paradoxes – perhaps this happens in the very process of painting which Chang carries out intuitively, creating the images, details and effects of each composition as they suggest themselves.
The cycles of nature provide a certainty and continuity against the changeability of contemporary urban life, but their violence also plays a role in the artist’s self-realization. Three monoprints, Self-Portrait as the Rabbit I Have Eaten, Running Rabbits, and Rabbits and Cannibals from 2003 reference the trauma of being made as a child to eat his pet rabbits, brought up in the family garden. In Flora and Fauna, the rabbit becomes internalized, a form of avatar. In reassembling and painting sea shells and other natural objects that used to host life, giving them a “second life”, perhaps Chang reverses his earlier action, cheats nature’s cycle using his imagination.
Interestingly, the earliest painting we encounter in the “Flora and Fauna” room, Planet of the Apes (after Ferdinand Hodler) (2001), seems to satirize the artist’s fascination with the animal kingdom, as a scene on TV of man romancing ape from the sci-fi movie shocks and titillates its viewer. 12 Similar feelings of discomfort and anxiety are evoked by the paintings Camouflage (2015) and Anthropocene (2016), where the animals come from the world of branding and advertising and the human protagonists are stereotyped as Adam and Eve in the style of B-movie posters. There is a sense here that the natural world has been reduced to mere iconography in human memory and understanding, as the real animals and their habitats disappear from the face of the earth.
12. The giant phallic object emerging from between the figure’s legs and the look on his face echo the central image in Hodler’s The Night (1889-1890), where the artist is surprised by the shrouded figure of Death. Chang seems to play off ideas about death and arousal that might be read in the Swiss symbolist artist’s work.
Self, Self in Nation, Self in the World
The exhibition structure suggests that Chang has built different spheres of subjectivity through different choices of materials and approaches to art-making. If the paintings in “Flora and Fauna” present an inner landscape of self, the diverse works in “The World is Flat” see the artist grappling with the world at large and locating himself in it, as a self among others.
The self-portraits of Chang’s monoprints show a young artist asking questions about himself – a lonely figure exploring body, mind, otherness; some pay tribute to Goya, Blake and Giacometti, artists whose works ask fundamental questions about man’s nature.
In an untitled work, the artist’s name, poorly written in Chinese, is printed in reverse over the image of Malaysia’s national flower, the bunga raya or hibiscus, and in Self-Portrait Cultivating Hibiscus (1997), its filaments pour like blood from the artist’s eyes and ears. Together with the Yellow-Skinned Song series, these images express the distress and problematics of locating himself by race, culture and nation – of being a Malaysian of Chinese ethnicity, unable to read or write in Chinese, and hence not quite fitting into his ethnic culture, and at the same time not being considered as an equal citizen of his home country. 13. Later works return to such issues in subtler and more expansive ways. In Maiden of the Ba Tree (2006), Chang chooses porcelain spoons decorated with a Confucian scene, a material that speaks of Chinese family values, to narrate a parable about a mother who cannot understand her son and believes he has abandoned her. As part of Immortal Beloved in 2013, stamp collages commemorate buried moments in history that have shaped the destiny of the Chinese community and race relations in Malaysia – the relocation and segregation of Chinese communities into New Villages by the British during the Emergency, the expulsion of Chinese majority Singapore from Malaysia in 1965, the racial riots of May 1969. 14
It is through this difficult but strong identification as a citizen of Malaysia, a postcolonial modern nation state in Asia, that Chang locates himself in the larger world and its history. For the exhibition The World is Flat, he embarked on a project of epic proportions, piecing together a vision of the world using the colours, images, and political and historical significances of stamps. As stamps become obsolete in the Internet age, so too perhaps the official narratives they represent, and Chang deliberately used the Internet, with its offer of democratic, instantaneous access to knowledge, to research the imagery he was creating for the series, cutting up stamps and reassembling them to his own interpretation of history.
The profile of HRH Queen Elizabeth II looms throughout, this being the most commonly found image on stamps, reflecting the reach and legacy of the British Empire. Among the historical figures, flora and fauna, and landmark events featured on the world map of the title work, we see Queen Elizabeth dining with herself on the spoils of empire; The Darwin-Wallace Theory of Evolution (2010) reminds us that much of our understanding of mankind and nature has sprung from the friendship and correspondence between two British gentlemen. This is a world whose story has been dictated by forces of empire, summed up in the brutally concise narrative Love at First Sight (2011), a series of simple images and text written from the point of view of a civilized native, constructed from and on 30c Malaysian stamps.
The World is Flat may help us and the artist locate himself within a vision of the world, but it is as important that he constructs it by exploring ways in which people receive information and connect, and how these are changing, in turn changing how we see the world and ourselves. Hidden under the official propaganda of stamps are myriad stories exchanged through personal correspondence, over weeks, months, years, often crossing borders. What happens when we start connecting with each other without the intervening substance of distance and time?
13. See Laura Fan on the social and political context of late 1990s Malaysia, when Chang was coming of age, in ‘Finding Magic in the Mundane’, in Chang Yoong Chia: The 2nd Seven Years, pp. 6-7.
14. The works selected for this exhibition represent only one aspect of the original show at Richard Koh Fine Art, Kuala Lumpur in 2013. Several works also drew on the narrative of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime, using the image of Hitler’s portrait on Nazi stamps, and personal histories of those who lived under this regime. See Teoh Ming Wah, ‘Who is the Immortal Beloved?’ (trans. Ying Ji), in Chang Yoong Chia: Immortal Beloved, Kuala Lumpur: Richard Koh Fine Art 2013.
Stories
Chang chooses to connect with others through the telling of stories, making sure to embed qualities of history, distance, patience and care in his process. His practice is not only about relating his own story, but also connecting with other people’s stories. So Chang travels to find stories, and taking part in residency programs has played an important role in shaping his productivity and practice. He searches for them in very personal ways, through collecting objects and listening to people.
The gist and subject matter for Immortal Beloved took inspiration from letters found at flea markets and second-hand paraphernalia shops, 15 the story of star-crossed lovers in The Botany of Desire is pieced together from conversations overheard in a public garden. In the ritual of embroidering images of the dead, Chang invites conversations about the one fact that binds us all, breaking the silence as well as the spell that surrounds the subject of death.
Chang’s story-telling impulse is most clearly seen in his “narrative” works which adopt a sequential format. In contrast to the density of his oil paintings and stamp collages which collapse time, place and information, these works pivot on the economy and simplicity of the fable, parable or even comic strip. Images unfold, sometimes accompanied by text, to suggest stories loaded with unspoken meanings. There is also a magical quality about how the narratives of these works emerge and find their own logic and symmetry, responding to the form of Chang’s chosen material.
Otaru Fable, made during Chang’s second residency in Sapporo in 2017, is a narrative about a journey made by the artist, his wife, and Okawada, a residency assistant, to the town of Otaru, a popular tourist destination. The cycle of the work’s process begins with this journey to collect discarded scallop shells from a restaurant in Otaru, and ends with its story painted on a sequence of 31 pairs of these shells. In the upper register of the sequence, black and white images take us on a road, through a tunnel; faces turn into shells, shells turn into butterflies, butterflies turn into faces; a man smokes, makes a bold gesture; a deer appears above the entrance of the tunnel. In the lower sequence, text recording events of the journey is written in coloured marker pen on the inside of the shells, in the way that tourists scrawl messages on the shells as memorabilia left in the restaurant. The artist-narrator here is a hopeful outsider, looking for answers; Okawada-san is its mysterious protagonist, wordlessly observing and acting as an agent in the artist’s search. It is the artist’s wife who makes the surprise sighting of the deer, “something real in nature” at the end of the journey, in which we see the reflection of the narrator’s face.
And so we come to another portrait of the artist, appearing like magic before the entrance to a dark tunnel. As the world as we know it begins so quickly not just to flatten but to evaporate – its flora and fauna depleting, the value of subjective experience fading as personal stories get sucked up into automated, anonymous narratives, agendas we cannot identify, and so much gets turned into waste and done too fast without conscience or commitment – Chang Yoong Chia, in the practice of his art, reminds us how we might all use this kind of magic, this second life, this mirror held up to the wonder and potential of life and its precariousness.
15. Ibid.