I thought
the fall would

kill me
but it only
made me real¹

 

Conflating melancholy and grandeur, Fran Chang utilizes the genesis of placid places as a sheltering device. In her painted landscapes, states of mind ungraspable by language are portrayed through erosions, dawns, and intimate cliffs. Tactile geographies are elevated on mysterious planes, hovering between nonexistence and promise, escape and reunion, vastness and brevity. Nature floats in silk, allowing itself to be traversed by light as it manifests itself solidly and permanently, reflecting the uncertainty of the paths that can be experienced in these liminal scenarios. The void is reiterated by the presence of the place, just as the escape from reality is a fabrication device enabling a full existence. In Zenith, Chang, of Taiwanese origin, accesses a darkness long avoided and finally welcomed.

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More than the contemplation of mountain ranges, glacial archipelagos, and firmaments, landscape for the artist is the mouth for cathartic and emancipatory feelings, primarily linked to the Asian diaspora. Faced with the infinite dilation that forms the horizon, one is confronted with the mirroring of subjective experiences, questioning the solidity of established truths and one’s own desires. Chang, in facing this gigantic restlessness, delved into systematic studies in astrophysics and astronomy at the university, in order to tension established beliefs and assimilate human frivolity in relation to the cosmos. She found herself, therefore, with possible inner immensities long denied, igniting a revisit to episodes of her own history—and the scars and resistances of Taiwanese migration by her mother—observing colossal geological activities, such as the untamed effusiveness of volcanoes and the sinuous and trembling dances of the aurora borealis. Cosmological and geographical metaphors mimic losses, triumphs, rediscoveries, and traumas, as if to say: I contain this within me.

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Patient and silent, Chang’s works aim to externalize emotional atmospheres with disciplined and honest posture towards painting itself. The choice of silk as a painting support came about by always finding herself surrounded by this fabric at home, as her mother, even before immigrating to Brazil, favored it in sewing her own clothes in a libertarian Taiwan. As for the reverence to Chinese artistic traditions, Chang approaches the rigor of the gogbi technique, especially in the detailed brushstrokes with realistic intention. The choice of contemplative landscapes approaches the shan shui tradition, in which mountains, streams, and waterfalls are depicted, with sensitivity to capturing the rhythms of nature, energetic fluidities, and the radiant possibility of the soul.

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In the pictorial plane, Chang keeps the language, folding it; in the structure, she unveils it. On the back of the paintings, over the veins of the lathed wood forming the stretcher, Chang stamps her name in red ink in guóyǔ sinograms—a variation of Mandarin used in Taiwan. Her yinzhang—traditional name of the millennia-old Chinese seal—is made with the calligraphy of her mother, who warned her that, in Taiwanese traditions, when giving someone a name, the meaning and the way it is written are of equal importance. Her Taiwanese name, 翴黀濆, means “according to the color,” as if in a maternal omen of the artist’s mutability and sensitivity. Naming someone, therefore, is endowing them with writing.

 

By stamping the paintings, Chang repeatedly embeds her name and that of her family—as well as their language—in the usually invisible structure of the serene landscapes she presents—in a critical note to the devaluation of Asian labor in productive dynamics, especially the feminine one. Shearing through Western imperialism, Chinese languages ​​appear as signifiers of their peoples and cultures in such a powerful way that “language and nation overlap—the former occluding the latter. Such a convergence renders China ‘reduced to (sur)face, image, and ideogram’.”² In this sinophobic movement, language is plundered in linguistic emptying and becomes a stereotype of ornamental visual culture, opaque and impenetrable, which indistinctly amalgamates and compresses cultural, idiomatic, and subjective multiplicities.

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In counterflow, Chang proposes a displacement opposite to the aforementioned: instead of presenting her name to be unveiled under a perspective of flourishes or exoticized formal whims, she reiterates the sinogram in its linguistic and naming strength, removing it from the figurative field, where it was placed by colonialism, and returning it to the semantic realm. In her practice, the artist addresses these acute political issues on multiple vectors, endowing her landscapes with paratextual elements in a way that presents “a work that is careful not to turn struggle into an object of consumption.”³

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The title of the exhibition, Zenith, is a term used in astronomy and trigonometry to trace an imagined path. A standing human body is taken as reference, always perpendicular to a point on a spheroidal surface, and from it, two optical vectors are considered: while the “true horizon” is the interception of the line of sight with the ground, forming an oblique and tangential line, the zenith—or “astronomical horizon”—is the perpendicular extension of that gaze now pointed towards the cosmic infinity, making a right angle with the axis of its own body. Through the senses, it seems that one is looking upwards, but from an abstract view in a macrocosmic space, one is looking forward.

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Chang relates to this spatial determination to reiterate that, although dispersed among countless other bodies, we always have a particular point of view. Despite sharing the same celestial sphere, each individual, at every moment of life, establishes a unique perspective in relation to the cosmos. The artist takes her perspective, neglected with emphatic occurrences in the social sphere by dynamics that aggregate sinophobia and misogyny, as a lofty place where one sees an imagined horizon with closed eyes—the only gateway capable of reaching what is distant to us. Feeling the chilly wind that numbs the face is now facing fearlessly the plunge into the abyss. Like strangers in silence, we gather a perennial intimacy, dazzled to see ourselves, different, in the same sky.

 

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Mateus Nunes is a curator at MASP (Museum of Art of São Paulo) and researcher. With a PhD in History of Art from the Universidade de Lisboa, he is a postdoctoral researcher of History of Art and Architecture at the Getty Foundation and at the Universidade de São Paulo. His writings are featured in periodicals such as Artforum, ArtReview, Flash Art, frieze, seLecT, Terremoto and ZUM.

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1. Ocean Vuong, Time is a Mother. London: Jonathan Cape, p. 10.
2. Oscar yi Hou, “On languishing, languaging, loving, aka: a dozen poem-pictures”. In: Oscar yi Hou. New York: James Fuentes Press, 2022, p. 14.
3. Trinh T. Minh-Ha, When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics. New York/London: Routledge, 1991, p. 149.