CHANG Ling: Illusion Society: Solo Exhibition

22 March - 13 May 2019

Installation Views

Overview

This March, Don Gallery is honored to present Illusion Society, Taiwanese artist CHANG Ling’s first solo show on the Mainland. Illusion Society is a continuation of CHANG Ling’s preoccupation with society’s realities, while also representing a deepening of exploration into such realities – an epochal illusion borne of CHANG Ling’s accumulated emotions and memories.

Through the Illusion Society series, CHANG Ling raises and practices “precision” in art. He encourages creators to abandon the constraints of logic, to view art as an externalization of the spiritual and an unveiling of emotion. Illusion Society expresses CHANG Ling’s modernistic madness, distorted figures within his paintings howl with gnashing teeth – the howl of an artist’s consciousness, as the artist says, “better to howl at one’s attitude than to howl outwardly”.

CHANG Ling’s internal tumult leaks from his unrestrained brushstrokes and use of color. This is especially evident in the pieces with photographic composition. Scenes of purposeful intimacy juxtaposed against an inexplicable sense of alienation collide to elicit immense emotional conflict that is difficult to process.

Large canvases seem to push the viewer into the margins, only to plunge them back into CHANG Ling’s mirages.

Although it is filled with grotesquery and abstraction, Illusion Society is grounded in a dialogue and critique of real social issues, as is consistent with CHANG Ling’s body of work. In Lust at a Rural Village (2013), the artist formed a mound of female bodies, speaking to the suppression of “sexuality” in contemporary society. While Immature Transformation (2018) is about the inexorable ties of the past, and the agony of such connections. In A Chandelier (2016), CHANG Ling plays a game of colors. The bright chandelier and the dark surrounds seem to rend as they meld, muddying the relationship between power and freedom. In this vein, Illusion Society seems on the surface to be a relinquishing of the worldly, but it is actually a roundabout, yet spirited entry back into the worldly that constructs illusion while dismantling it.

CHANG Ling was born in 1975 in Hualien City, Taiwan. In 2000, he received his Diplôme National d'Arts Plastiques from the Ecole Nationale Beaux-Art de Bourges, and received his Diplôme National Supérieur d'Arts Plastique from the Ecole Nationale Superieure Beaux-Art de Paris in 2004, studying under Christian Boltanski, Jean-Luc Vilmouth, and Jean-Marc Bustamente. He joined “Hantoo” in Taipei in 2006.

CHANG Ling’s experiences in France have given him an understanding of diverse social structures and cultural systems that has informed his art. His solo shows include Illusion Society (Fo Guang Yuan Paris Art Gallery, Paris, 2017), Illusion Society (Gallerie Jean-Francois Cazaux, Paris, 2015), and Illusion Society – Portraits of Ordinary People (MOT/ ARTS, Taipei, 2013). Group shows include Fight Club – Hantoo 20th (Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei, 2018), and Hardcore Rally with Hantoo Art Group (National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei, 2017).

Works