Platform-L Contemporary Art Center are pleased to share the video documentation of Chang’s recent performance on the opening night of his exhibition of paintings The Night Migrations at Platform-L Contemporary Art Center in Seoul. The performance took place at the Live Arts Hall, which is located in the basement of the art centre and provides the ideal host venue as the hall was specially designed for interdisciplinary performance. Exceptional acoustic and lighting effects in the space highlight the voices of the two actors who accompany the Chang’s movement, as well as their own corporal gestures.
Chang’s painting performance is profoundly inspired by six poems – The Night Migrations, Twilight, September Twilight, Midsummer, Parable and Midnight – which share Chang’s regularly referenced subject matter, including the impermanence of life, metamorphosis and the mysterious in-between zone of death and life and also featured recitals of three poems by the celebrated American poet Louise Glück, alternating in Korean and in English.
The Night Migrations, curated by Manu Park (former director at Nam June Paik Art Centre), and will feature 38 artworks from Chang’s Shadow of Buddha and Blossoms Flourishing series. The Shadow of Buddha series (1996–2005) deals with the metamorphosis of human existence and contrasts with Blossoms Flourishing series (1999–2005) which encapsulates the ephemerality of life. During a period of sorrow and rejuvenation, Chang began to employ more colour in his paintings, and in particular he used a bright pink, his beloved late wife May Der’s favourite colour. Chang painted The Blossom Flourishing series using gouache, ink and acrylic. It embodies a period when he produced large, vibrantly coloured paintings, some of which amount to colour-field paintings. The paintings present an intensity of layered colour with exuberant, life-giving pinks and white that yet hold a dark form within. In a prosaic sense, the dark form is the trunk and branches of the blossoming tree, visible to varying degrees but expressing a sense of coiled anguish.
Taiwanese artist Yahon Chang (b. 1948) is a contemporary ink painter who transforms the Daoist and Zen Buddhist spontaneous brush painting and calligraphy practices of the Tang and Southern Song Dynasties into mesmerising artworks through performative movement. Drawing on Chinese and Zen (Chan) Buddhist traditions, he understands painting as an activity that connects the body, mind and spirit; his entire body functions as an axis for these expressive paintings, whose controlled energy is the product of decades of training in calligraphy and Chinese martial arts. His act of painting, which consists of drawing, dripping and even pouring the paint on canvas, evokes a phreatic zone or internal reservoir in each viewer’s mindscape.
In his performance works, Chang stands on large sheets of linen or xuan paper, and wields a brush almost as long as he is tall. The artist’s ink painting performance invites a sense of transcendence in the fluidity of space, embodying the feeling of being transported over flowing water to a place beyond the actual. As the performance progresses, fuelled by the centrifugal force that explodes toward exteriority and appropriates it, a dark maelstrom is activated that begins to flood the figures of sentient beings drifting on the painting’s surface. This act of painting performance impart both motor memory and inner strength, so that in his seventies, Chang is stronger than in his youth.
The Night Migrations is on view at Platform-L Contemporary Art Center, Seoul, through 15 October. A new monograph, Yahon Chang: Painting as Performance, published by Hatje Cantz Verlag is available to order now.
