Yahon Chang | A Thousands Moons on A Thousands Rivers
Date:12:00pm, Thursday, Oct 19
Address: 11, Quai de Conti,75006 Paris
Participating Artists：Yahon Chang,Yu-Jung Chen
Curated by Manu Park
Participating Artists：Yahon Chang,Yu-Jung Chen
Curated by Manu Park
Yahon Chang (1948) lives and works in Taipei, Taiwan. Brought up in Taiwan after the Second World War, his works portray a particular visual language voicing agony, adversity, and acceptance whilst striving for higher spirituality and peace. Through the act of painting, both cultural and spiritual values are embodied in an intensely personal manner. In his paintings, the Taiwanese artist Yahon Chang brings together traditional Chinese ink-wash painting and Western forms of artistic expression to produce a synthesis of East and West. Typically standing on large sheets of linen cloth or xuan paper and wielding a brush almost as long as he is tall, Chang creates works imbued with performative energy characterized by large, sweeping brushstrokes. Drawing on Chinese literati, Zen (Chan) Buddhist traditions and Christian faith, the artist understands painting as an activity that connects body, mind and soul through the exploration of the relationship between calligraphy, Chinese literati, Zen philosophy, martial art, and spirituality. His entire body functions as an axis for these expressive paintings and is influenced by his training in calligraphy.
A Thousands Moons on A Thousands Rivers
Taiwanese artist Yahon Chang's painting performance, titled A Thousands Moons on A Thousands Rivers is a collaboration project with an emerging Taiwanese multi-media artist, Yu-Jung Chen. The artwork has been named after the omnipresent nature of the symbolic Buddhist figure of Water-Moon Avalokiteshvara, an embodiment of compassion, who could characterize the core meaning of Chang's painting as performance.
A new commission sound work by Yu-Jung Chen will feature Yahon Chang's painting performance. This new sound work consisting of three movements will be performed by the sound artist himself who will do the improvisation performance ,especially for the third movement, in response to the painting performer’s dynamic action painting. While for its movement I, using the digital sound montage technique such as "harmonizer", "reverb" and "delay" and mainly "sound defamiliarization" the sound artist recreates the recorded sounds of some percussion instruments playing in the deep water, for its movement II, scraping the strings inside a piano Chen creates the spotty and flaky sounds to recall the moonlight reflecting on the water. This sound work featuring Yahon Chang's act of painting which consists in the painter's own bodily gestures and movements could highlight the ritual aspect of the performance where all the spectators are invited to be part of the immersive virtual world.
*The artist is presented by Ink Studio