CHANG YOONG CHIA: Second Life
26 November 2018 – 24 February 2019
National Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
(Curatorial team: Tan Hui Koon, Teoh Ming Wah and Beverly Yong) / (Supported by Yobo, huakhuak & RogueArt)
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.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Chang Yoong Chia (b. 1975, Kuala Lumpur) lives and works in Kuala Lumpur. Since graduating from the Malaysian Institute of Art in 1996, he has been exhibiting both in Malaysia and internationally. Although trained as a painter, Chang’s practice also uses different kinds of media in the making of his artworks.
Notable exhibitions include the APB Signature Art Prize Finalist Exhibition (Singapore Art Museum, 2011), the 14th Asian Art Biennale Bangladesh (2010), Domestic Bliss at Sculpture Square, Singapore (2007), the 3rd Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale (2005), Malaysian Art Now (National Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur 2005), Khoj International Artist Workshop (2002) and his solo exhibitions The 2nd Seven Years: Quilt of the Dead, Flora & Fauna IV, Narratives (The Annexe Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, co-organized by Valentine Willie Fine Art & The Japan Foundation 2009), The World is Flat (Richard Koh Fine Art, Singapore 2011), Body of Water (Art-U Room, Tokyo 2016) and How Are You? I Am Well (A+ Works of Art, Kuala Lumpur 2018).
He has also participated in artist residencies including S-AIR Second Artist Residency Program (2017) and S-Air in Sapporo and Wanakio in Okinawa as part of Japan Foundation’s JENESYS Program (2008), Re: Engage: The People’s Court, Penang (2014-2015), 1 Shanthi Road, Bangalore (2012), Art as Environment in Tropic of Cancer artist-in-residence in Chiayi county, Taiwan (2007), Ujiae Art Studio in Gwangju (2007), C21, Blackburn, UK (2006), and Rimbun Dahan Artist Residency in Kuang, Malaysia (2006).
Revisit the exhibition at Chang Yoong Chia’s website.
See reviews in Art Asia Pacific, The Edge and The Star.