Zoey Chih-Ying Chang is a multi-disciplinary artist who expands her interest across digital and traditional canvases. Her engagement with both the digital reality and the tangible world often left her pondering questions that caught her by surprise. Her main focus so far included online identity and web aesthetics, the appearance of limitation and the existence of absence.
Zoey Chih-Ying Chang
Rainbow Land — 60*73 cm, 2021
Dream of a Sunrise — 60*92 cm, 2021
I Remember Something Clicked — 54*73 cm, 2021
A Half Rotating World — 54*73 cm, 2020
‘The Obstacle that is Always There’ is a series of four paintings each possessing different content.
The only connection between the paintings as a series is the sight of an obstructing obstacle that bursts into the canvas from the right and extends across to the left. The paintings were never displayed besides each other or documented before finishing the last in the series (Dream of Sunrise). The repetitive obstacle imagery can be explained as an attempt to escape the artist’s consciousness, and for me, it was the first time I’d realised the tendency of feeling restrained.
The series began when I was pressured by the covid pandemic and had to return to my home country. The constant anticipation of the next potential bright turning point of the pandemic, a possible safe return to UK to finish the unfinished paintings, and the disappointment followed by each new victory claimed by the virus locked me for months with a mind that desires movement and a body in stalemate.
Medium:
Painting on CanvasMemory of a Cat — When the cat was forgotten, the space it was in was carved hollow and empty, leaving behind an obstructed landscape as well as its existence of absence.
The Bush, The Flower, The Pillars — I understand photogrammetry as seeing through someone else's eyes, and trying to remember what they have seen. Some of the elements ought to be left out, like peaking outside from a pillared roman structure, information fragmented, view obscured. And it is indeed annoying to be behind the bars, restricted.
Digital material always brings me awe and excitement that strikes different than traditional media.
Within the digital, photogrammetry brought me interest and through this process of making, the concern of the artist can be easily shifted from the articulation of visual effect, the control of brush strokes to something else. It deprived the artist from the rights of expression and touch, the process and left them with only the ability to start and annotate. If viewed at a different angle, this restriction grants the artist focus on matters outside of the canvas. It is to paint without painting, to employ the machine with the mission of temperature and smell, it is collaborative painting between human memory and machine memory.