Yahon Chang

Brought up in Taiwan after 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.

He recently participated in various performances A Thousand Moons on A Thousand Rivers at London’s Outset Contemporary Art Fund and Asia NOW art fair in Paris (2023), The Night Migrations at Platform-L Contemporary Art Center in Seoul (2023), Floating Poetry, Meandering Mindscape, during the Berlin Gallery Weekend (2023) curated by Manu Park, and in an international group exhibition, the Secret Wing at the Timișoara National Art Museum, part of the Art Encounters Biennial (2021) in Timișoar curated by Maria Rus Bojan.

He held his first large-scale solo painting performance at Performa 19 in New York (2019). He was Outset’s artist-in-residence (2019) in London, responding to a space designed by spatial practitioners Cooking Sections. Major solo exhibitions include Poetry of the Flow, curated by Maria Rus Bojan at Manifesta 12 in Palermo (2018) and The Question of Beings at MACRO in Rome (2016) and a collateral event of the 56th International Art Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia (2015). The artist’s work has been shown extensively across Asia and is held in the permanent collections of Shanghai Art Museum and Busan Museum of Art.

In April 2023, Berlin-based publisher Hatje Cantz Verlag published the artist’s first major monograph in English, Yahon Chang: Painting as Performance.