Language Painting

John Chang’s work expresses the duality of his Chinese and American experience by juxtaposing traditional and unconventional symbols and images through the application of mixed media. Deconstructed Chinese Calligraphy layered over segments of world history and references to modern pop-culture depict his personal transformation. Born and raised in Shanghai, China. John Chang is an artist based in Southern California. John’s works have been widely exhibited, including, Alexander Brest Museum at Jacksonville University, Jacksonville, FL. Julina Togonon Fine Art, San Francisco, CA. Fresh Paint Art Gallery, Culver City, CA. Art Cube Gallery, Laguna Beach, CA. Chang’s work has been featured in various publications such as Pasadena Star News, KTLA, and Art In America, Art Ltd. John Chang is a recipient Spring 2011 Working Art Grant from WAO. John Chang holds an MFA in Visual Art from College of Art and Design at Lesley University. He also earned a BA in Decorative Arts and Design from Shanghai Light Industry College. He also studied with the well know artists Xu Bing and Judith Barry. Calligraphy expresses the shared space of the personal and the political. Chinese students must devote many years to memorizing several thousand characters. Each character must be written flawlessly and must be both neat and pleasing to the eye, and such rote exercises condition one to submit to authority. In the public square and all walls everywhere, big calligraphic characters were a constant reminder of a collective voice, and so people discounted the empty rhetoric of the official media. Yet in classical Chinese, the script, or shu, is so sacred that it is believed to be capable of affecting change in the natural order of things. By invoking calligraphic forms, I am commenting on the distortion of language, but I am also reclaiming the energy of the written word. Tapping into my ancestral roots, I also use pigments for their symbolic power. For example, black and white are the colors of most ink painting but also represent yin and yang; red and yellow represent happiness, wealth, and health. I consider myself a "spiritual escapist." I am especially interested in making and unmaking meaning with the combination of word and image "” particularly in this age of digital communication. Incorporating contemporary events and pop culture, I collect daily newspapers in English and Chinese, cut specific text, graphics and articles, and put them in categories.