Chang Yuchen

June 25, 2025

Chang Yuchen works in an interdisciplinary manner – writing as weaving, drawing as translation, teaching as hospitality, commerce as social experiment (see Use Value), and publishing as a dandelion spreading its seeds. Yuchen is also an advocate for the art of her mother, Jin Mei. Yuchen was a recipient of the New York Public Library Picture Collection Artist Fellowship, Queens Art Fund New Work Grant, Poetry Project Curatorial Fellowship, Huayu Youth Award, Luminarts Fellowship, etc. She has shown/performed her work at Walker Art Center, Beijing Commune, By Art Matter, Carnegie Museum of Art, Amant, Artists Space, UCCA Dune, Para Site, and Taikwun Contemporary. She was an artist in residence at Smack Mellon, Asymmetry Art Foundation, MASS MoCA, Museum of Art and Design, and Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop. Yuchen has written for publications including Heichi Magazine, Press and Fold, Art in Print, and Randian.

Can you tell us a little bit about your practice?

I’ll start with my name. I used to introduce myself as Yuchen Chang, following the English convention of first name first. But a few years ago, I started to realize that sonically and graphically, my name feels more coherent with the last name in front, Chang Yuchen. So now I impose that order. But that insistence on naming reflects my broader approach to translation; it doesn’t always have to be smooth or equivalent. I try to preserve glitchiness and idiosyncrasies.

I always find it difficult to introduce myself, but maybe I’ll start with one part of myself today. I’ve been working on this language project based on coral pieces I collected during a residency in Malaysia in 2019. The beach there was covered with fragments of coral bodies. They were dying, but also part of a natural process where pieces get flushed out and become sand. I had this strange sensation when I saw them – it felt like I could understand or even read them. I started collecting, categorizing, and drawing them. I didn’t know what I would do with the drawings at first. I think it was a way to spend time really looking.

How did you start making connections between the coral drawings as a language project?

During that trip, I came across a trilingual Malay-Chinese-English dictionary from the 1970s, which was originally intended for the Chinese diaspora in Malaysia. I started copying some example sentences, selecting 182 in total, and then began translating them using corals. In my experience of learning a foreign language like English, the example sentences in the pedagogical materials often feel distant from reality, even calcified. But the sentences in this dictionary felt full of life. Some examples include: “Take good care to total recovery in case of relapse.” “My older brother likes writing novels.” “The rioter has been arrested by police.” “Upon leaving the cinema, he felt dizzy.”

You’re right—these sentences have a certain liveliness, just like the corals. Perhaps it’s because both were once alive and active in a way they aren’t anymore. The life cycle of the coral mirrors the words you’re creating, giving them new life.

I remember seeing live corals while swimming, and I immediately felt like I was intruding. They have their own agency. But the dehydrated and bleached ones on the beach somehow felt more open, maybe because they had lost their vitality, I felt like I could project my own onto them. With the living ones, I knew I shouldn’t.

It reminded me of a story from a poet. When he was a little boy, his father told him to say “thank you” with every inhale and “goodbye” with every exhale, just to keep him busy. He later found himself still doing it after all these years. He learned that when you inhale, your body fills with oxygen, and your bones get bigger. And when you exhale, the air is used – you’re decaying a little. So all speech, including poetry, is made from exhaling. Made from used air, it’s a substrate. And that there’s a negative relationship between vitality and meaning: meaning comes after vitality. Just like how diaries are written after the day has passed.

In that sense, this dictionary is a kind of sediment, a trace of the lived experiences of this community in the 1970s. Similarly, corals are also sediments, left behind by the ocean’s life cycle. So I think there’s a relationship there. And I think you’re really on point, maybe the reason I find them expressive and meaningful is because their current form still holds the gesture of movement and time.

I see how the corals are meticulously organized, and you really notice how they relate to each other. They look like pieces of text and there’s a kind of familial relationship between one another, something that also shows up in the way we use language.

I guess that’s why I call my process more of a translation, because I think, since corals themselves are expressive, I’m really looking for the overlapping space between what we call meaning in a dictionary and the connotation that they embody. In the past six years that I’ve been making a language, I started to realize, the principle of language is one of economy, meaning we want to use fewer words to mean more things.

I think that’s why, for example, Malay used the Arabic alphabet from the 13th to 16th century as a result of the Islamization of the Malay Archipelago, and then with Roman letters as a result of British colonization. I think I’m also becoming more conscious of myself, speaking and living in English. But I have to say that English is a very economically sound language. There are 26 letters, and you can use them to make more words. Which is not true in many other languages.

I’ve been thinking about the poet Don Mee Choi, who talks about the impossibility of translation, especially between Korean and English, because of the history of colonialism and violence. It made me think about your work and what “impossibility” means.

I would agree that translation is impossible, but I guess it depends on how we define translation. I do think that equivalence is a fantasy, rooted in a Eurocentric tradition of linguistics that tries to find the equivalence of other languages by comparing them against a Latin-based system.

It might be unfashionable to quote Walter Benjamin, but I really love his essay, “The Task of the Translator”. In it, he describes the idea of a pure language that once existed, like a flower vase, which then shattered. And other languages we speak today are fragments of that broken vase. So if you imagine two pieces, they’re not meant to match perfectly; they’re meant to complement each other. They’re matching at the edges, not in the contents.

With those images in mind, I believe translation is not only possible, but it actually opens up more possibilities than the original. For example, during a workshop at the Amant Foundation in 2022, I shared my accordion book, which contained 216 words from the first three years of the project. I explained the etymology of each word and why I had translated it that way. At the end, I invited the audience to translate some words I hadn’t yet worked on, and every translation they offered made total sense – to me and to everyone in the room. It felt like a truly successful social experiment.

Can you share what you’re showing at the Walker Art Center?

The show is called The Ways of Knowing. I’m showing 48 drawings from Coral Dictionary created between 2019 and 2024, along with the corresponding coral pieces. They’re displayed on four tables, with 12 drawings on each. I try to create different stories through the sequencing of the sentences.

Chang Yuchen

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