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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.

-     Sarah Sentilles

In a tongue-in-cheek dialogue with design as promoted in magazines like Elle Décor, Chang thinks of the paintings as color swatches, which, when hung together, tell “color stories.” The symbols as patterns spread virally from one panel to the next. Chang’s excess of design exposes the loaded meanings behind what we often think of as merely pretty patterns.

Chang also exploits cultural symbols so ubiquitous as to be commodified, such as the Chinese symbol for Double Happiness. For the traditional Chinese woman, its paradoxical promise of the good life meant becoming a submissive housewife. In more contemporary terms, the process of seeking its attainment is a trap the inherently breeds perpetual discontent, similar to the suburban dystopic byproduct of the American dream.

-Hosfelt Gallery