The Mass Series

Assembled from visitors’ responses to Chang’s participatory installations, the Mass series features portraits of collective anxieties, pains, insights, and desires that consume society today. Implementing ink transfer techniques, Chang hand-cuts and burnishes each response, excavating sediments of paper until only black ink remains infused in the canvas. The result echoes traditional Chinese reproductions of venerated texts through ink rubbings, the first "copy machine" of text. The strips of text evoke the shape of redacted words, a practice that became widespread in World War II soldiers’ letters home to censor emotions that might hinder faith in war-time efforts. Here, a wide range of emotional testimonies are laid bare in brutalist form.