Candy Chang’s work encompasses installations and paintings that weave intimate testimonies from strangers into broader meditations on community and ritual. Her global public art project Before I Die has been created in over 5,000 cities across 75 countries. After the End was a 2021 New York Times Critic’s Pick. She is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Rockefeller Foundation, Puffin Foundation, and Black Rock Arts Foundation, and has received fellowships from the Asian Cultural Council, TED, Hemera Foundation, Center for Urban Pedagogy, and the World Economic Forum.
Trained in architecture and urban planning, she co-founded a record label in her early 20s in which she and her friends wheat-pasted posters around New York City, and these experiences emboldened her to create participatory street art on vacant buildings to imagine civic change driven by residents. This led to a nation-wide tool used by over three million people and 200 organizations. After the death of a loved one, her attention shifted to the future of ritual in public life. Her installations invite anonymous testimonies of desire, dread, sorrow, hope, and courage from the public, challenging norms of visibility and modes of communion. Works include Before I Die, confessions in a Las Vegas casino, illuminated walls for collective meditation, 50,000 anxieties and hopes in a museum, a cemetery altar to reflect on loss in all forms, and a video installation of nightly dreams.
Her work has been exhibited in the Venice Architecture Biennale, Smithsonian American Art Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, Nelson-Atkins Museum, Rubin Museum, Mint Museum, and the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum. She has created installations with Art Production Fund, Mural Arts Philadelphia, Green-Wood Cemetery, and the Annenberg Foundation. She has given talks at TED, Walker Art Center, Global Health Summit, School of Visual Arts, and the American Planning Association.
Born and raised in the American Midwest, Chang has lived and worked in New York City, New Orleans, Helsinki, Philadelphia, London, Taipei, and the Mojave Desert. She is currently based in Columbus, Ohio, where she lives down the hall from her parents.
Artist Statement
I grew up secular and when people I loved died, my interest in the role of ritual in public life began. I craved shared spaces to commune over existential questions without the requirement of shared doctrine. In a time of increasing loneliness, division, and disembodiment from living behind screens, we need more places that speak to the pains of our age—to reflect, forgive, atone, reckon, and see ourselves in each other.
Born in the U.S., I grew up in a culture that champions individual expression while living in a Taiwanese household where Chinese calligraphy was worshipped as both personal and spiritual art. This instilled my reverence for the handwritten word, which is present in most of my work. When we write by hand, we return to the body and leave traces of our humanity that cannot be captured with digital text. When we anonymously share without fear of judgment or desire for recognition, what emerges looks profoundly different and more honest than performative digital forums.
As the steward of hundreds of thousands of handwritten reflections on life in the early 21st century, I use these fragments in paintings and videos in a generative cycle of work that explores language, desire, the civic and the sacred, and our relation to the past. Inspirations include the speculative worlds of Philip K. Dick and David Lynch, the humanistic visions of city life by Jane Jacobs and Juhani Pallasmaa, the mark-making of Chu Chen-Nan (朱 振 南) and Agnes Martin, the philosophies of Alfred Whitehead and Byung-Chul Han, and the laid-back curiosity of Zhuangzi (莊子).
Contact
Speaking inquiries: The Lavin Agency | Email
Art inquiries: Email
Stay in touch: Bluesky | Instagram | Email
Education
M.S. Urban Planning, Columbia University
B.S. Architecture and B.F.A., University of Michigan