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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