Julie Chang: Vibrant Matter, Introduction

Julie Chang: Vibrant Matter

Sarah Sentilles, guest author

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… she engages patterns to explore the personal and political forces and systems that shape and misshape our lives: narratives, cultures, myths, institutions, and expectations.

- 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