Candy Chang is a Taiwanese American artist whose work uncovers the psychological layers within communities. Merging the civic and the sacred, her practice reimagines the future of ritual and includes installations, paintings, and videos generated from thousands of handwritten reflections from the public. Testimonies of desire, dread, sorrow, hope, and courage are surfaced in shared spaces that challenge norms of visibility and offer new modes of communion.
She is known for Before I Die, which has been created in over 5,000 cities in over 75 countries and called “one of the most creative community projects ever” by The Atlantic. Trained in architecture, design, and urban planning, Chang began creating street art while running a record label and applied these tactics to new forms of civic engagement. I Wish This Was was featured in the Venice Architecture Biennale and led to a Rockefeller Tulane University Urban Innovation Fellowship to develop Neighborland, a civic engagement tool used by over three million people. After struggling with grief, the focus of her work shifted to the state of our psyches. After the End, a communal ritual that reckons with loss, was a New York Times Critic’s Pick. She has also created secular spaces for confession, a monument of over 50,000 anxieties and hopes, and electrified shrines that introduce emotional barriers into the public sphere. Her work has been exhibited in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, SFMOMA, Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, Nelson-Atkins Museum, and the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum. She often collaborates with James A. Reeves to merge public art with site-specific video installations.
After a decade of creating participatory art, she has become the steward of hundreds of thousands of handwritten anxieties, hopes, pains, insights, and moments of grace in the early 21st century. Chinese calligraphy instilled her reverence for the handwritten word, and she reproduces visitors’ responses in paintings that speak to both abstract expressionism and the traditional Asian arts, including ink rubbings, seals, and landscape painting. She believes these anonymous, handwritten confessions offer a profound portrait of our common humanity that can foster civic health and a sense of belonging in an increasingly fragmented world.
She is an Asian Cultural Council Fellow, TED Senior Fellow, World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, Urban Innovation Fellow, and was named one of the Top 100 Leaders in Public Interest Design. She is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Rockefeller Foundation, Black Rock Arts Foundation, and Hemera Foundation. Born in Pittsburgh, she grew up in Ohio and has lived in New York City, New Orleans, Helsinki, and the Mojave Desert, and completed artist residencies in Iceland, Portugal, England, Finland, and Greece. She currently lives in Columbus, Ohio.
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