Chang Yoong Chia: Second Life is an exhibition surveying the practice of a Malaysian mid-career artist whose work has quietly captivated audiences in Malaysia and in the many places around the world he has exhibited. Always working intuitively, Chang Yoong Chia has used personal narrative and memory as a subjective space to explore the imaginative possibilities of painting and object-making.

​

This exhibition comprises around 130 works, including a number made in connection with artist residencies in different countries around Asia. 

​

It showcases on the one hand the artist’s painting practice, where he works only in black and white oils. In Flora and Fauna, a semi-autobiographical series which has been evolving since 2003, Chang builds fantastical worlds on canvas, informed by a childhood curiosity about nature, and conjures new creatures and stories emerging from discarded shells and bones.  

A key interest for Chang is material, and the exhibition also includes early experiments on paper, and collages, objects and installations he has created reinterpreting found and collected objects, drawing from the histories and geographies embedded in them. Parables of misunderstanding and conflict transform decorated ceramic ware; shadowy tales and characters emerge on fallen leaves from Yogyakarta and Bangalore. In works from Immortal Beloved (2013) and The World is Flat (2011), buried events in Malaysian history and grand narratives of global geopolitics are painstakingly reconstructed using the artist’s collection of thousands of postage stamps.

​

Chang’s most well-travelled artwork, Quilt of the Dead, an ongoing collaboration conceived as a way of talking about and remembering the dead, is considered in the context of his interest in engaging in conversation with different audiences.

​

The exhibition title, Second Life, refers to the renewal of used and expired materials through art-making, to the reinvention and remembering of stories, and to the parallel existence art-making allows its maker.