The term “Fabricating Mandarin Duck” in Chinese, originated from Wangan Island and Jiangjun Islet, meaning the construction of the 24th naval base of the Shinyo Special Attack Unit. “Fabricating Mandarin Duck” was inspired by the artist’s emotional connection after his first residency experience and witness of the dark tourism out of distorted history in Wangan Island, Penghu archipelago. This artwork interweaves two narratives of both the gloomy history of war during the end of Japanese Colonial Period in Taiwan, and the history of misuse and misappropriation of the famous waterfowl name “Mandarin Duck (Yuan Yang)” in Chinese literature, which vaguely correspond to each other. Through various approaches of geopolitics, biology and deconstruction of literary texts, the land name of the Japanese naval base “Mandarin Duck Caves (Yuanyang Caves)” seems to prove itself an inevitable fate on the borderline, geographically, biologically, literally yet politically. This is Taiwan’s Allegory of the Cave, reflecting the truth, distortion as well as our eternal blind spot in the gloomy darkness.
CHANG’s works have won first prize of the Kaohsiung Awards, were selected in Taipei Art Awards and nominated for Taishin Arts Award, have been presented in the National Art Exhibition, and are part of the collections in the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, and Art Bank Taiwan.
Selected programs: Solastalgia (NP), The Arctic Circle (NO), Port Journeys annual meeting (TW), ICHSEA (KR), the Anthropocene curriculum – Disaster Haggyo #1 (KR/NL), post-academic program at Jan van Eyck Academie (NL, 22-23)
CHANG regards ocean as a worldview reflecting the current terrestrial civilization of Anthropocene, and regards water as a media penetrating everything from the inner to the outer worlds and embodying the unstable state of transition, flow and anti-subjectivity corresponding to his homeland Taiwan under subtropical monsoon climate. His art deals with those rapid-changing environments like ship, island, water as well as port, in which he tries to unveil the universal experiences and gray area inside the tensions between human, civilization and nature constantly shaping each other.
