張家翔
Chia-Hsiang Chang

Born in 1996 in Changhua, Taiwan, the artist graduated from the MFA programme in the Department of Fine Arts at the National Changhua University of Education.

Working primarily with moving image and installation, the practice draws from scenes and observations encountered in everyday life, approaching the image as an unstable and constantly shifting state of existence. Through the deconstruction of scenes and objects within the image, elements are released from the flat surface and extended into spatial gaps and site-based interruptions, creating moments of dislocation and fragmentation within the viewing experience.

By combining temporary objects and constructed environments, the work develops transitional spaces that offer viewers a temporary departure from everyday reality, while reconsidering the relationships between image, object, and perception.

Recent recognitions include selection for the Mixed Media category of the National Art Exhibition (2023), finalist for the Jury Prize at the Contemporary Annual Exhibition (2023), and receiving support from the Shih An Art Award (2022).

On-Site Legitimisation

On-Site Legitimisation explores the landscapes of Changhua through a long-term observation of the increasingly compressed, hybridised, and industrialised conditions imposed upon agricultural land. Across these landscapes, illegal structures coexist closely with the land itself, often emerging as temporary, rapidly expanding survival strategies that transform life-sustaining farmland into spaces of industrial protection and containment.

Through bodily intervention within the site and the processing of mixed media materials, the work attempts to evoke the fragmented modes of perception produced through the repetitive coexistence of agricultural and industrial labour. Using video and installation, the project further proposes an imagined condition of “performing legality” — a state that appears legitimate while remaining rooted in unstable and unresolved realities.

Artist Notes

My practice begins with the re-observation of everyday scenes, approaching the image as an unstable and constantly shifting state of existence. Much like a shadow, the image becomes a medium that loosens reality and mediates perception, carrying subtle emotions of unease, attachment, and escape.

Through the deconstruction of familiar scenes and objects, I attempt to release the image from its flattened frame. By treating the image as an unstable source of light and through the staging of spatial environments, moving image is transformed into a material presence with physical weight and depth. Inserted into cracks within architectural space and moments of site-based interruption, the image produces fragmentation and displacement within the act of viewing, constructing temporary relationships of gathering and suspension. These works offer fleeting moments of escape from reality while reconsidering the relationship between shadow, image, and object, disrupting conventional modes of perception and moving between the boundaries of reality and fiction.

My practice seeks to respond to the question of how image and installation can loosen the forms of repression embedded within everyday life and lived reality. As geographical locations and creative contexts continue to shift, my body repeatedly enters different environments — factory labour spaces in my hometown, residency sites, and landscapes shaped by the collage-like coexistence of farmland and industrial structures. Each encounter becomes both a process of re-observation and intervention, as well as an embodied and temporary lived experience.

Within these shifting conditions, I have become aware that I consistently enter sites from a position suspended between participation and detachment. This distant mode of observation places me simultaneously as both outsider and participant within the scene. Such distance has become an important method through which I observe, understand, and create. Artistic practice therefore becomes both a medium for establishing relationships with external environments and a space through which feelings of unease can be situated and processed.

My work examines how the image constructs spaces of escape, while reflecting on the visual tension produced by temporary and fragmented landscapes within everyday environments. Through a continual negotiation between site observation, image-making, and the positioning of the viewer, I continue to explore the potential spaces of escape that may emerge between image and spatial experience.

Artist Info

Chia-Hsiang Chang
artist and arts educator, lives and work in Changhua

Practice
Video art and mixed media Installation

Website
changchiahsiang.wixsite.com/chang-chia-hsiang

Instagram
@jo041161