Julie Chang: Vibrant Matter, Full Essay

What makes a home? What affects belonging? Which objects are sacred? What difference might images make? In her work, Julie Chang raises questions about how identities are constructed, and how understandings and misunderstandings of both self and other might be resisted, subverted, and reimagined. The daughter of immigrants, Chang grew up in Orange County, California, and now lives and works in San Francisco. Inspired by diverse sources – from wallpaper to weavings to genetic mutations and systems theory – Chang’s visual vocabulary brings together differing perspectives to provoke conversations about race, class, gender, and cultural commodification. Her art is her attempt to reconcile the paradox of suffering and life-affirming beauty she sees in the world and to remember that what was made can be unmade and remade.

Chang’s intricately layered and woven images result from a meditative practice and deep devotion to craft. Traditional pattern work might be manipulated to abstraction or collide and mingle alongside palm trees, UFOs, antidepressants, sex workers, and oil derricks. In Chang’s images, recognizable forms are freed from narrative and inserted into new contexts. The familiar becomes unfamiliar, open to multiple interpretations and meanings.

The objects and images Chang paints seem to come alive. For me, her work brings to mind the book I’ve returned to most often over the past decade, Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter. For almost every class I taught at the art school where I worked when I lived in Portland, Oregon, I assigned Bennett’s book. One semester, an MFA student asked to meet with me before class. She is from South Korea, and she was worried. “I thought I was getting better at reading philosophy in English,” she said, her eyes welling. “But I didn’t understand this book at all.”

            “Tell me what you think it’s about,” I said.

            “By my translation, Bennett is saying everything is alive,” the student said. “The desk. My water bottle. The bricks. The cement floor. But that can’t be right. I must have misunderstood.”

            “No,” I told her. “You understood Bennett’s argument perfectly.”

What if we lived as if everything were alive? Bennett asks in Vibrant Matter. What if we could recognize that things act, that they change us? How would seeing objects as vibrant – as animate – alter our consumer culture? How might it transform what we call sacred? How would it transform our relationships to the beings we share the planet with?

Similar questions animate Chang’s work. In Design for the Well-Lived Life, for example, Chang asks how the objects we fill our houses with create a home. How do they reveal our identities? How might they hide them? Anti-depressant pills, palm trees, tennis rackets, diamond engagement rings, luxury brands, children’s toys, and chandeliers repeat, converge, separate, and collide. Chang’s parents emigrated from China to Orange County, where they pursued “the suburban American Dream,” which for them included a large ranch-style home decorated with elaborate wallpapers and chandeliers. According to Chang, these decorative items were both “aspirational objects” and a way to “camouflage” her parents’ immigrant status by filling their rooms with what an American interior decorator told them to buy.

Another way to think about vibrant matter in Chang’s work is to engage the concept of migration – the forced and voluntary movement of people, ideas, and objects around the globe. What happens when we cross borders? When we relocate? When we are labeled “foreign” or “alien” or not of this place? Symbols in Chang’s work travel across boundaries, transformed by encounters with other forms. Her formal systems suggest the invented structures and borders in which we operate – rules, constraints, and possibilities made visible and material. Colors shift and shapes transform, a visual metaphor, she told me, for how we are pushed and pulled and restrained. Inspired by the visual and technical components of weaving, Chang engages patterns to explore the personal and political forces and systems that shape and misshape our lives: narratives, cultures, myths, institutions, and expectations. Her work shows both constraint and possibility, the discipline of the state and our own self-discipline. Arrivals, foreignness, dislocation, the struggle to feel at home in one’s own body – Chang uses line and color to make visible hidden histories and the longing, anxiety, fear, alienation, and desire for belonging she finds there. How might the world look different if migration were a human right?

In Chinese. Japanese. Indian Chief., Chang exposes racism as it operates in the songs, games, and objects with which we live our daily lives. Sex workers on their hands and knees, images of housewives and My Little Pony^©, titles like sugar and spice and everything nice – Chang questions what it means to be a “good girl,” and how the childhood stories given to her by her classmates and her parents warped her sense of self. “Why can’t you be sweet?” she was asked again and again as a child. The title Chinese. Japanese. Indian Chief refers to a children’s game Chang played in elementary school. Just as racism is embedded in seemingly innocuous playground games, you can also find it in the beautiful patterns created by Chang. Her colorful paintings on panel are filled with borrowed and stereotypical imagery from Japanese, Chinese, and Native American cultures like teepees, Chinese pagodas, and Japanese rainbows, motifs connected to how “otherness” is constructed. Chang plays with how what we’re trained to think of as “pretty patterns” and “home décor” often contain symbols borrowed without permission from other places and people, commodified as beautiful decoration, even as the images appropriate or cause harm. This series calls attention to ongoing appropriation, making visible what’s happening all the time in fashion and décor and children’s play. For Chang, the work is unwieldy. It gets out of control. It wants to fall apart, to fail.

 In Vibrant Matter, Bennett writes, “We knowers are haunted . . . by a painful nagging feeling that something’s being forgotten or left out.” She is referring to the failure of language and concepts to capture things in and of themselves. My understanding of a tree is not the same as the tree itself. My understanding of you is not the same as you yourself. Our words and ideas fall short. For me, as a writer, the act of making this failure visible is an ethical practice. My mentor, the late theologian Gordon Kaufman, used to tell me that the most ethical thing anyone can say is I might be wrong. There is a part of every being that cannot be captured, cannot be written, cannot be understood, a part that escapes. Bennett engages Theodor Adorno’s term for this uncapturable share. He calls it nonidentity, that “which is not subject to knowledge,” the “discomfiting sense of the inadequacy of representation [that] remains no matter how refined or analytically precise one’s concepts become.” The ethical challenge for Bennett is not to eliminate this “discomforting experience,” but to accentuate it, to learn to live with it, to let what has been left out trouble you. Bennett reminds her reader of the origin of the word absolute: ab means off, and solver means to loosen. The absolute, she writes, is that which is loosened off; it is on the loose—and Bennett argues that it would be a mistake to think “the absolute” refers only to God. For Bennett – and for me, and I think for Chang, and perhaps for most artists – everything is on the loose.

Amulets is Chang’s newest body of work. She reminded me that the word amulet comes from the Latin word amuletum, which Pliny’s Natural History describes as “an object that protects a person from trouble.” Amulet is also thought to be related to amoliri, which means “to avert, to carry away, remove.” Amulets are objects that can heal, protect, save. Chang is interested in the idea that anything can function as an amulet – gems, statues, coins, drawings, plant parts, animal parts, and words. What matters is not the objects themselves, but how they are used and believed in. When I was in divinity school, we studied Paul Tillich’s understanding of symbols, how when we choose to see a specific object as a symbol for the divine, as pointing to the holy, it elevates the general object to sacred status too. Seeing communion bread as holy renders all bread holy. Seeing communion wine as holy renders all wine holy. Seeing one human as holy renders all humans holy. Yet another approach to vibrant matter.

The paintings in Chang’s Amulet series are intimate in scale and deep. Chang adds layers and layers of paint and resin, and then she adds more layers, more paint, more resin, building depth, generating abstraction. Each painting is dense. Chang weaves together layers of patterned imagery, pushing and pulling what is in the background and what is in the foreground, covering it all with resin, burying it, and then beginning again. There is loss in this work, things the viewer can no longer see because they have been hidden from view, masked, redacted. There is also revelation. She reveals and brings back what has been hidden. The paintings start to feel like jewels, like sacred objects. They read like palimpsests to me. Looking at them, I think of monks’ work copying holy texts. When they ran out of parchment, they would write new words on top of existing language, layer upon layer of storytelling and belief.

For Chang, painting her amulets becomes a form of meditation and prayer, as she weaves into them hopes and desires and requests for clarity and strength and transformation, wishes for herself and for others, hopes for the world – though all of that language makes her uncomfortable. She doesn’t have a fully formed understanding of prayer or meditation, she told me, because she didn’t grow up with any religion or practice in that way. Is her painting a kind of prayer? She doesn’t know, but she’s comfortable in not knowing. Like the patterns and imagery she hides from view, Chang thinks of prayer and meditation as “lost work.” She told me, “It’s unseen, and its invisibility is irrelevant, because it was done, it happened, and that’s all that matters.”

“Our real lives hold within them our royal lives; the inspiration to be more than we are, to find new solutions; to live beyond the moment.” Jeanette Winterson writes in Art Objects. “To see outside of a dead vision is not an optical illusion.” Oppression is tied to sight. Racism and sexism, in addition to being structural and insidious, are visual: we sort bodies by how we see bodies. And there have been years of mis-seeing. It is urgent work, then, to see outside a dead vision, to question the how of seeing, to render the act of looking itself visible. I think Chang’s art helps with this disruptive work. She reminds us that what we think we see is not all there is to see.

- Sarah Sentilles is a writer, teacher, critical theorist, scholar of religion, and author of many books, including Draw Your Weapons, which won the 2018 PEN Award for Creative Nonfiction. Find out more about her work at www.sarahsentilles.com

WORKS CITED

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.

Winterson, Jeanette. Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery. London: Jonathan Cape, 1995.