ABOUT THE ARTIST
Hello, I'm Michelle Chang, a visual artist with a particular interest in the oil painting medium and drawing. This is my website where I can show you my artwork and projects.
In my art making, in all its forms and structures, is its own language. Like all others, it becomes a mechanism for expressing thought where thought is the information given the capacity to take form where the form is the artwork. Within this framework of art as language I hope to create moments of archive, in visual textbooks that houses moments of the temporal. Making permanent and still something that otherwise is simply a fleeting scene and asking its viewer to contemplate and think upon this idyllic stillness. I probe at the act of translation and transition between the real moment and the created image and how those two differ, how they are alike, and how they work in tandem with each other to create new histories and narratives. However, no matter the medium, an act of translation is always an act of necessary violence since something is always being lost or changed in the process and it is also in this vanishing act where my work derives its worth from.
Lately, my work has taken root in cultural identity – not so much in the broader sense but in a far more personalized narrative that almost aims to critique it. Whatever subject I choose to focus on, my work always derives from the same place, that being a cultural dichotomy that leaves me floating in the grey space that exists between the two: someone who is not quite Chinese and not quite Western. My work is figurative and because of this, I tend to draw inspiration from physical manifestations of this issue which are visible in our coeval landscape that I have obsessively recognized as Chinatowns, oriental gardens, Chinese restaurants, heritage sites, cultural centres, etc. These spaces all hold unspoken cultural narratives within them whether they intended them or not due to how and why they had initially been created. My pieces, therefore, begin not with the artwork itself but instead with formulating research into spaces that I find most interesting in terms of historical or personal significance, and it is through this knowledge of the background that heavily informs the becoming of my work.
While in the past, the goal of engaging in these translations was to bridge the gap in my own identity, I find now that the more I research and create, the bigger this gap becomes, almost as if I am now a complete outsider to both spaces. Though in realizing this, I believe it brings another layer into its meaning – perhaps I do not need to bridge the gap but emphasize it further to bring to light the controversies that have been concealed and hidden away due to centuries of attempting to do what I intended to do initially: close the gap. I try now to utilize the grey space in which I occupy as my strength in art making now where I come into a conversation with both spaces with relative confidence and be able to speak from a position that is influenced by both without predispositions from either.
Ultimately my work is an archive, a documentation of history that should be read as a vertical structure, layers upon layers, not horizontal and certainly not linear. Each layer is informed by what preceded and proceeds it where it becomes cyclical. My current work now has a different goal in mind: to showcase the complex histories of Chinese culture within the westernized space and create form out of these spaces of cultural dichotomy which mirrors my personal experience thus far. Always I am searching.
Michelle Chang
If you have any questions about my works, you are welcome to contact me at