Hunger in the Static

2023
Ink on paper
50 x 50 in | 127 x 127 cm

What appears to be a diffuse circle is composed entirely of the handwritten statement I’m hungry. Chang created a stamp of this visitor response to her installation work and imprinted it thousands of times. Focusing the mind on both appetite and ambition, she leaves the viewer to consider the tension between the fundamental need for physical survival and a more complex psychological drive towards personal fulfillment that consumes much of society today.

Informed by the aesthetics of abstraction, the enduring use of Chinese seals as signature, and the calligraphic discipline of replicating revered texts as an act of mastery, Chang combines these practices into a ritual to contemplate her relationship with desire. Saturated around a bare one-inch center point, the statement gradually disintegrates outward, dissolving into faint marks that require concentration to decipher.