Smack Mellon presents an experimental project within Chang Yuchen’s practice, considering the effect of communication technologies as a way to explore distance and loss–of time, memory, and shared experiences. Presented in a two channel video installation with sound over five hours in length, this intimate work comprises selections from a database of screenshots captured by Chang’s late husband, Yuan Yi, as well as a dream archive transcribed by the artist a few years later.
Filling a wall in the back of the gallery, the first video takes shape through thousands of low-resolution screenshots of the artist, mediated through a video chat window from the perspective of Yuan Yi, her late husband who passed away suddenly over a decade ago. Yuan obsessively documented their virtual intimacy in this way throughout the long-distance relationship the two shared. When seen on a single timeline, the rapidity and consistency of the images coalesce into a soft filmic narrative, capturing the longing across the temporal/geographic distances and the cursory nature of the communication medium. Vibrating with the poor image quality of screen grabs, now over a decade old, the subtle shifts in lighting and movement distribute broadly across exaggerated pixels. Sounds of the artist’s breath create the soundtrack, which is echoed in still moments when the artist sleeps or listens, where the only visible movement between frames is the subtle rise and fall of her chest. Yuan himself appears in blips—as both spectre and voyeur—where he occasionally grabbed an image of himself instead.
Displayed on a monitor across the gallery, a text Chang recorded and later translated from ten dreams overlays slowed-down video footage also captured by Yuan Yi, itself dreamlike in its abstraction of light and dark. The two videos, which can’t be seen at the same time, do not explain one another but serve as counter balances, both extrapolations of distance and love as mediated by screens. The voyeur sits opposite to untranslatable interiority. Quiet, spare, and saturated with time in the shape of shared moments, Chang’s installation elucidates the bare potential of storage media, while gesturing to the mundane in-capturability of togetherness.
Chang Yuchen works in an interdisciplinary manner: writing as weaving, drawing as translation, teaching as hospitality, commerce as social experiment (see Use Value) and publishing as a dandelion spreading its seeds. Yuchen was a recipient of New York Public Library Picture Collection Artist Fellowship, Queens Art Fund New Work Grant, Poetry Project Curatorial Fellowship, Huayu Youth Award, Luminarts Fellowship, etc. She has shown/performed her work at Walker Art Center, Beijing Commune, Carnegie Museum of Art, Amant, Artists Space, Instituto Tomie Ohtake, UCCA Dune, Para Site, Taikwun Contemporary. She was an artist in residence at Smack Mellon, Asymmetry Art Foundation, MASS MoCA, Museum of Art and Design, Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop. Yuchen has written for publications including Heichi Magazine, Press and Fold, Art in Print, and Randian.
Image: Installation view, Chang Yuchen, For those who share mornings and evenings. Image courtesy of Smack Mellon. Photo by Etienne Frossard.
This exhibition is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, New York City Council Member Lincoln Restler, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, and with generous support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Jacques and Natasha Gelman Foundation, Robert Lehman Foundation, Select Equity Group Foundation, many individuals and Smack Mellon’s Members.
Smack Mellon’s programs are also made possible with generous support from The Edward and Sally Van Lier Fund of The New York Community Trust, Jerome Foundation, Lily Auchincloss Foundation, Wolf Kahn Foundation, Cornelia T. Bailey Foundation, Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation Inc, The Roy and Niuta Titus Foundation, and an Anonymous Donor.
In-kind donations and services are provided by Materials for the Arts, NYC Department of Cultural Affairs/NYC Department of Sanitation/NYC Department of Education and Sage and Coombe Architects.
Space for Smack Mellon’s programs is generously provided by the Walentas family and Two Trees Management.
