Chang Yoong Chia: How Are You? I Am Well

CHANG YOONG CHIA

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Copyright Š 2018

A+ WORKS of ART All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in retrieval systems or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or others without permission in writing from the Director of A+ Works of Art.

Published by A+ Works of Art (JL Contemporary Art Sdn Bhd) d6-G-8, d6 Trade Centre 801 Jalan Sentul 51000 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia +6018 333 3399 info@aplusart.asia www.aplusart.asia Essay by Beverly Yong Project Management Joshua Lim Nikki Ong Book design and concept by Imaya Wong Photography by Phua Chin Kok Beverly Yong has been writing about art in Malaysia and Southeast Asia since the late 1990s. She is a director of RogueArt, and co-editor-in-chief of the Narratives in Malaysian Art series of books.

ISBN 978 967 15431 2 2 Published in a limited edition of 500 books Printed by Unico Services All images and text copyright of the artist, writer and A+ Works of Art

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How Are You?

I Am Well

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章永佳 「井」 引言

「井」这一系列创作是我尝试逐一解答多年来积累的问题的路径，关于艺术和我在其中的位置的许多问 题。我不是成长于一个鼓励艺术(创作)的环境，却依然寻求艺术。为甚么我需要艺术?它又从哪里来? 我是从脑海里浮现的一画面开始这个系列，它让我产生一种很奇妙的感觉，就像我后来在伟大画作中发现 的那种感觉。那画面是:望下一口水井的儿时记忆。 在我小时候，我的家人每年都会在年终学校假期时去槟城看望我的外祖父母。那时候我国还没有南北大 道，从吉隆坡到槟城的车程是从黎明一直持续到黄昏，反之亦然。我们穿过蜿蜒曲折的旧路，沿途拜访其他亲 戚的家。其中停下休息的一站是我大伯的家，位于霹雳州丹绒督阿冷。他房子的前部份用作供应当地锡矿工人 的杂货店，后面住家则有一个小小的、封闭的庭院，院子中央有一口井。这井，就是我第一次体验到类似於看 一幅画的地方。 我来自於很少接触到艺术的背景，却一直想成为一名艺术家，而我现在也已经成为艺术家一段时间了。不 过，如今我却到达了一个阶段/点，我觉得我所持有的关于艺术的想法和信念正在瓦解，世界不再是一个可辨识 的地方。因此我回到了根本 — 回溯到那口我看到奇迹，看到世界反照的水井--寻找地下水来让疲惫的旅行者恢 复活力。

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INTRODUCTION

This series is my way to work through the many questions I have accumulated through the years about art and about my place in it. I did not grow up in an environment where art was encouraged yet I have sought for it. Why do I need it and where does it come from?

I began this series with an image of something that gave me a great sense of wonder, akin to the sense of wonder I found much later in great paintings: My childhood memory of looking into a well.

When I was small, my family would make annual trips to Penang during the year-end school break to visit my grandparents. The North-South Highway had not yet come into existence. The drive from KL to Penang and vice versa would last from dawn till dusk, as we traversed through the meandering old roads, visiting other relatives’ homes along the way. One such pit stop was my uncle’s home in Tanjung Tualang, Perak. The front of the house functioned as a grocery shop catering for local tin mine workers, while the back was the residential area, with a small, enclosed courtyard. In the middle of the courtyard, there was a well. This well is where I first experienced something akin to looking at a painting.

I come from a background of minimal exposure to art, yet I always wanted to be an artist and I have been one for some time now. But I have reached a point where I feel the ideas and beliefs I have held about art are unraveling. The world is no longer a recognizable place. Therefore, I am returning back to basics — to the well I saw so much wonder in, a reflection of the world, looking for groundwater to refresh a tired traveller.

Chang Yoong Chia

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WISHING WELL 2018 GRAPHITE ON PAPER WITH MALAYSIAN COINS, VARIABLE DIMENSIONS

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THE AWKWARD GIRAFFE

A boy looks down a well and sees a vastness he cannot comprehend. Perhaps it is his future, perhaps it is everything in and beyond the world. Later in life, he will describe the experience as something akin to looking at a painting. He throws a question into the vastness, and in that way of great, intangible mysteries, it throws back an ineffable, Christmas-cracker-joke answer.

In How Are You? I Am Well, Chang Yoong Chia starts to tell the story of why and how he became an artist. Although most of his work to date has involved some element of autobiography, this is perhaps his first organized attempt to make a kind of personal statement about his practice.

The title of the exhibition is taken from the title of a small painting made for Body of Water, a solo show in Tokyo in 2016. Its image of a well, with a pair of hands clutching its edge, has also provided a kind of template for this new exhibition, where we are invited to peer down a well in each of the works.

Chang’s Study Note sketches illustrate how he uses this template as a form of allegory, in which the well is a passage between the seen world and the unseen world, with different elements performing the function of “barrier”, “mirror”, “avatar”, “guardian”—terms and concepts borrowed from fantasy video gaming. The exhibition explores the dialogue between the “real” world and the realm of the imagination, and attempts to find some meaning for artistic practice therein.

The real world is one of decisions and expectations and compromises in the “dance of life and death”, where we have parents and children, earn money, go shopping—as described in the poem The Giraffe, which was written by the artist while painting The Drinking Giraffe. In the poem, the giraffe represents something gigantic and wonderful and natural that cannot fit into the real world— an embarrassing figure for its denizens, who do not know what to make of it. The poem indicates struggle, awkwardness, and a kind of despair as the imaginary struggles to breathe in the real world.

The Drinking Giraffe, however, depicts a playful scene rather than one of torture. In each of the other paintings in the exhibition, we look down at a pair of hands resting on the edge of the well— symbolising the interchangeable “avatar”, they could stand for our own hands, or the artist’s. In The Drinking Giraffe, these hands reach out to create a shadow play of a giraffe’s profile on the wall of the well as the long-necked creature stretches down placidly to drink from it. To this viewer, the painting talks about the act and power of imagining, and giving form to the imaginary. Here, we or the artist imagine, and the giraffe is the thing that we dream up; referring back to the premise of the exhibition, the giraffe might represent art itself.

So then, in the poem, this giraffe gets itself into something of a knot, the difficult crossroads perhaps that the artist has come to in his understanding of art. The poem is also presented as a tall painting, where the text is painted using the Square Words Calligraphy system invented by Chinese artist Xu Bing ( 徐冰), in which the English words are made to look like Chinese characters. The artist chose this form of presentation partly as an expression of his own ambivalent relationship with verbal language—like many Malaysian Chinese, he cannot write in Chinese, and although his native tongue is not English and his command of it is not perfect, it is the only language he writes in (to address its imperfections, he asked poet Bernice Chauly to “edit” The Giraffe). Surely, though, it is also a specific

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reference to another artist’s act of turning language into pictures, and the notions of transformation and hidden meaning embedded in his experiment.

Because transformation and metamorphosis have been prevailing themes throughout Chang’s own practice, and the narratives in his works often suggest the forms of fable and allegory, with all their potential meanings and secrets. In this exhibition, these elements come to the fore as ways of giving form to the imaginary, and exploring the basic processes of creativity—how words come together to frame meanings, how marks and lines make up images, how stories lead into other stories and images lead into other images.

The image of the well is a suitably fairytale format for such explorations, as eddies of water pool into images, distorting one’s own reflection, conjuring fantastical stories. At the level of making, Chang’s process is naturally intuitive and we can see this best in drawings like The Apple Well, Rabbit Clinging to the Well and Cat in the Sky, where the shape of the well and the ripples of water morph into sensuous, mesmerizing images. Even as he works on larger, fuller painted compositions based on sketches, new stories and elements are discovered, reshaping their character throughout their process. Animals, which connote wonder, magic and the fabular in Chang’s works, appear throughout. Cat in the Sky transforms into the less gentle Panthera Tigris; elsewhere, a crocodile seems to crawl out of the surface of the moon, a surprised carp emerges out of the well-water. In Cuticle, the well turns into an enchanted forest, as we look down into the face of a woman (as is often the case, it is the face of the artist’s wife Ming Wah), whose hair weaves into the roots of trees which delineate a circle of text telling the story of Rapunzel in one direction and the legend of Medusa in the other. “Cuticle” can denote the protective outer layer of hair, or of a shell, invertebrate or plant. Both Rapunzel and Medusa are heroines in complex stories involving not only hair but also love, transformation, deception, rescue, and revenge. The layers and possible readings here are deliberately manifold and provocative.

The pair of paintings, Candy Candy’s Left Eye and Candy Candy’s Right Eye, and the poem Candy Candy, presented as a painting (with the text in ordinary Roman script stenciled onto the wall of the well), anchor the exhibition, referring to the story and context of the well described by the artist in his introduction—the well in the back yard of his uncle’s shophouse.

Without knowing any of the background inspiration behind the works, they present a puzzle or mystery, with slightly sinister or sordid overtones, and a touch of science fiction. The poem was written after Candy Candy’s Left Eye and Candy Candy’s Right Eye were completed, and provides a partial gloss on their imagery, introducing the character of “Candy” and her questionable relationship with the writer’s uncle. It is a kind of ballad dedicated to an elusive muse or heroine, playing on the sentimental theme of seeing the moon and stars in her eyes. There is a particular interest here in the suggestibility of form, and Chang experiments with repetitions and transformations of words and verbal imagery in parallel with the narrative strategies used in the pair of paintings. So we are drawn to look into the wells that are also Candy Candy’s eyes, and the vast cosmos they seem to contain,

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and to follow the writer’s question in through her left eye and back out through her right. The Left Eye and the Right Eye are almost mirror images of each other, but not quite. In the journey from left to right, planets and nebulae have realigned, the figures encircling the iris in a comet’s tail have disappeared, the sparkle or bright star in one eye has transformed into an origami crane in the other, waiting perhaps to carry us away. Along the edges of the well, there is no longer the limp arm of a “waiting corpse” but rather the bare feet of a boy and another pair of feet in leather shoes. Despite the fact that we receive an answer to the poet’s simple question, as a homonymic pun, its meaning is left open. We might read the set of works as being about seeing and the infinity of the imagination as a form of space travel to seek answers to our questions. And yet, who, and what is the significance of Candy Candy?

Manga fans may recognize Candy Candy as a 1970s anime classic, whose heroine is blonde and big-eyed Candice White Audley. Chang’s uncle decided to appropriate her image as a logo for his lingerie manufacturing company, and became the big success story in the family as a wealthy entrepreneur. Here is a real life story about transformation, or shape-shifting, about pretending to be someone else to fit in or do well—something Chang as a young man would have been pressured to aspire to by those around him. The flipside of creativity is artifice. In the first lines of the first three verses of Candy Candy, Chang is not only making a play on his muse’s name by adjusting it in different ways, he is mimicking the strategies of appropriation (or piracy). So we might also then take away the lesson that since art and its meanings are open, they can be changed, and commodified, in all sort of ways, with a bit of imagination.

A small drawing sticks out among all the works. In its well or vortex is a simple sketch of Princess Hang Li Poh emerging from a cloud underneath a short handwritten anecdote: Perhaps seeing coins inside the well inspired me to be charitable. I went on a school trip to Malacca and gave a few coins to a beggar near the well even though my mother had repeatedly discouraged me for reasons I could not remember.

Later that night, I dreamt of the same beggar turning into Princess Hang Li Poh. And with that I felt my action had been vindicated.

Here is a story about a boy fighting back with his imagination, protesting his innocence. In a way, Chang Yoong Chia is still that boy, grappling with others’ and his own expectations of his practice as an artist, and fighting his way back to the innocence of the basic act of making art, of giving form to the imaginary.

Chang plans to make a “wishing well” by placing a circular drawing of his face in a corner of the exhibition space, bordered by coins. Like the giraffe, he is not afraid of exposing himself or of the awkwardness of his presence in this invitational gesture, double-edged and open-ended in its meaning, and is just waiting to see what we will do.

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Works

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HOW ARE YOU? I AM WELL 井

2015 OIL ON CANVAS, 65 X 45 CM

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CANDY CANDY’S RIGHT EYE

2017 OIL ON CANVAS, 150 X 150 CM

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CANDY CANDY’S LEFT EYE

2017 OIL ON CANVAS, 150 X 150 CM

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CUTICLE

2017 OIL ON CANVAS, 175 X 150 CM

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DRY SPELL

2017 OIL ON CANVAS, 175 X 150 CM

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SURFACE OF THE MOON, BOTTOM OF THE WELL

2017 OIL ON CANVAS, 175 X 150 CM

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THE CRAB’S CLAW (FOR CAPTURING ARTISTS)

2018 OIL ON CANVAS, 153 X 214 CM

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BEACON

2017 OIL ON CANVAS, 150 X 150 CM

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CAT IN THE SKY

2018 OIL ON CANVAS, 100 X 100 CM

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PANTHERA TIGRIS

2018 OIL ON CANVAS, 153 X 153 CM

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THE DRINKING GIRAFFE

2017 OIL ON CANVAS, 209 X 137 CM

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MIRAGE

2017 OIL ON CANVAS, 100 X 100 CM

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CANDY CANDY

Candice (Candy) White Audrey, Your saucer-like eyes shine brightly, Through them I could ride a flying teacup into the celestial sea, Like my uncle did and see what it got him.

Candance (Candy) White Aubrey, The stars and moon are mere specks in the sky, And you are not real but that means you cannot die, Though my uncle had left you, you were never his to begin with.

Candy Candy White Ausrey, Your blonde hair fluff and curly, Your jeans, your sneakers and underwear underneath, Which my uncle made a fortune, a bungalow by the sea.

I peer into you, Candy Candy’s left eye, Like peering into a well and I shout “How Are You!?”

That question traveling light years in the speckled universe, Disappearing into a black hole, Then miraculously escaped to the Crab Nebula, Blazing back to the Milky Way, Clutching on the tail of Halley’s comet, Which comes into orbit every 74 to 79 years, And through all these the question hardened into an answer, So it’s up the well to deliver to the inquisitor, Only to find a corpse at the top, Who waited in vain.

However.

CANDY CANDY (POEM) 2017 OIL ON CANVAS, 85 X 67 CM

In Candy Candy’s right eye, As the question is sucked into the black hole, As Einstein and the quadriplegic man on the electric wheelchair had explained, Space and Time is like an elastic rubber, So the question finds a way back to be an answer, To me in waiting, desperate and eager, For the distracted, the unobservant, I remind you again the question: “How Are You?” From the well below echoes the answer: “I am Well”.

Written by Chang Yoong Chia 8 Dec 2017

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THE GIRAFFE

The Giraffe knows not the problems of men it reaches down a well, like how I’d ride an escalator it drinks from its image, it does not give a toss unlike the escalator’s rider whose image is his/her/their boss, in buildings with escalators, ventilated air and retail outlets the giraffe would go crazy and run amok its head on level one, its hoofs on the mezzanine floor surrounded by security guards with nets and batons while window shoppers can’t decide whether to look at the giraffe who is dancing with security guards with berets and all or clothes or shoes or handbags or watches or handphones or a discounted basketball.

The giraffe knows not the problems we face it reaches down a well for a drink of water a trickle — a drop will launch a series of ripples that will not stop till the water resettles meanwhile, we have to settle that deal between our lives, earning money or dreams or the economy the environment, our future, our children, our parents’ impending deaths ultimately, we to settle for that dance of life and death while the ripples slowly become again a mirror and the giraffe is gone until the next encounter.

The giraffe unwittingly ties a knot on its elongated neck while recovering from vertigo due to lack of oxygen to its head it tries to get up from a bout of drinking water from the bottom of the well almost dry one won’t be blamed for thinking what he was thinking one must’ve been thinking the giraffe had been drinking and drank so much it got drunk

THE GIRAFFE (POEM) 2018 OIL ON CANVAS, 85 X 45 CM, 120 X 50 CM (TWO CANVASES)

The giraffe had been sinking to the bottom of despair, but despair was what it was drinking the only way to escape was to come up for air it survived the ordeal, but for a knotted neck The giraffe will not be back.

Written by Chang Yoong Chia Edited by Bernice Chauly 8 Dec 2017

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PORTABLE H.A.Y.I.A.W I 2017 GRAPHITE ON PINE WOOD BOX 13 (L) X 19 (W) X 5 (H) CM

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PORTABLE H.A.Y.I.A.W II 2017 GRAPHITE ON PINE WOOD BOX 13 (L) X 19 (W) X 5 (H) CM

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THE APPLE WELL 2018 CHARCOAL AND CHALK ON PAPER, 152 X 140 CM

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CAT IN THE WELL

THE WELL IS THE NIPPLE IS THE EYE

2017

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CHARCOAL ON PAPER, 41 X 32 CM

CHARCOAL ON PAPER, 41 X 32 CM

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RIPPLES IN THE WELL,

RIPPLES IN THE WELL,

WHEN NO ONE IS AROUND I

WHEN NO ONE IS AROUND II

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CHARCOAL ON PAPER, 41 X 32 CM

CHARCOAL ON PAPER, 41 X 32 CM

ECHO 2017 GRAPHITE ON PAPER, 56 X 47.5 CM

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PRINCESS HANG LI POH 2017 GRAPHITE ON PAPER, 42 X 29.7 CM

ILLUSION 2017 GRAPHITE ON PAPER, 42 X 29.7 CM

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RABBIT CLINGING ON TO THE WELL 2018 CHARCOAL AND CHALK ON PAPER, 89 X 63 CM

VORTEX 2018 CHARCOAL AND CHALK ON PAPER, 97 X 63 CM

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ARTIST’S PROFILE

Chang Yoong Chia approaches art-making with a sense of wonder and exploration. The concept of metamorphosis is key to his choice of subject matter, material and process, and the rich imagery and narratives in his work are drawn from a fascination with both the natural world and the manmade, and his own place within them. Alongside drawing and painting on canvas, he has made works transforming overlooked objects from nature such as shells, leaves, and bones, worked with different communities to create embroidered portraits to remember the deceased, and painstakingly constructed maps of world history from postage stamps.

Chang Yoong Chia graduated in 1996 from the Malaysian Institute of Art, where he majored in painting, and lives and works in Kuala Lumpur. Chang held his first solo exhibition, Flora and Fauna in 2004, building on this series of autobiographical paintings and drawings to produce Flora and Fauna II in 2008 and Flora and Fauna III in 2009. A new body of works made from postage stamps collected by the artist since childhood was shown in The World is Flat in 2011 in Singapore, and the title work earned Chang a place as finalist in the prestigious APB Signature Prize that year. This was followed by The Immortal Beloved in 2013 in Kuala Lumpur, Body of Water in 2016 in Tokyo, and Second Life in Sapporo in 2017.

Participating in residency programmes has created opportunities for the artist to engage with new stories and experiences, and exhibit his works to different types of audiences. Through 2006 he was artist-in-residence at Rimbun Dahan, and since then he has taken part in residencies in the UK, Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Indonesia, China, India, and Penang.

Important international group participations have included the 3rd Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale (2005), Welcome to the Jungle (Yokohama Museum of Art & Contemporary Art Museum, Kumamoto, 2013), Journey (Israel Museum, Jerusalem, 2014), and Open Sea (Musée d’Art Contemporain du Lyon, 2015).

A major exhibition will be held of the artist’s work from 1994 to 2016 at the National Art Gallery of Malaysia this coming October.

CURRICULUM VITAE Chang Yoong Chia (b. 23 July 1975) EDUCATION 1993 — 1996 Malaysian Institute of Art (Diploma in Fine Art, Majoring in Painting).

SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2018 How Are You? I Am Well, A+ Works of Art, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

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2017 Second Life, Hokkaido University of Education Gallery, Sapporo, Japan.

2016 Body of Water, Art-U Room, Tokyo, Japan.

2013 Immortal Beloved, Richard Koh Fine Art, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

2012 The Botany of Desire, 1 Shanthiroad Studio, Bangalore, India.

2011 The World is Flat, Richard Koh Fine Art,

Singapore.

2009 The 2nd Seven Years: Quilt of the Dead, Flora & Fauna IV, Narratives, The Annexe Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

(Co-organized by Valentine Willie Fine Art & Japan Foundation, KL).

2008 Safe House: Flora & Fauna III, Valentine Willie Fine Art, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

2004 Flora & Fauna, Reka Art Space, Kelana Jaya, Malaysia.

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2017 KL Biennale, National Visual Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

2016 ASIA YOUNG 36, Jeonbuk Museum of Art, Jeonju, South Korea.

Art Stage Singapore 2016, Singapore.

Era Mahathir, Galeri Ilham, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

2015 Art of ASEAN, Bank Negara Malaysia Museum and Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Open Sea, Musee d’Art Contemporain du Lyon, France.

2014 START, Richard Koh Fine Art, Saatchi Gallery, London, UK. Journey, Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel.

2013 Welcome to the Jungle, Yokohama Museum of Art & Contemporary Art Museum Kumamoto, Japan.

ME.NA.SA. Art, Southeast Asia Pavilion, Beirut, Lebanon.

Absurd(c)ity, National Visual Arts Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

2012 Conception In Reconciliation, Selasar Sunaryo, Bandung, Indonesia & Taman Budaya, Yogjakarta, Indonesia.

Art Stage, Richard Koh Fine Art, Singapore.

2011 APB Signature Art Prize Finalist Exhibition 2011, Singapore Art Museum, Singapore.

2nd Chongqing Youth Biennale, Sichuan Fine Art Institute, Chongqing, China.

2010 14th Bangladesh Asian Art Biennale, Dhaka, Bangladesh.

2009 Tanah Air: Art for Nature 2009, Rimbun Dahan, Kuang, Malaysia.

2008 Wanakio 2008, Maejima Art Center, Okinawa, Japan.

JENESYS Artist Open Studio, NPO S-Air, Sapporo, Japan.

The German Connection: Art, Pelita Hati House of Art, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Out of Line: Doodles and Dreamscapes, The Annexe Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Art Multiple 2008, Ke Center for Contemporary Arts, Shanghai, China.

2007 Between Generations: 50 years across Modern Art in Malaysia, Asian Art Museum, University of Malaya,

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Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia & Muzium & Galeri Tuanku Fauziah, University Sains Malaysia, Pulau Pinang, Malaysia.

Domestic Bliss, Sculpture Square, Singapore.

Open Studio, former Jeollanam-do Provincial Office, Gwangju, Korea.

Discovery of May, 5.18 Memorial Foundation, Gwangju, Korea.

12th Rimbun Dahan Artist Residency Exhibition, Rimbun Dahan, Malaysia.

2006 Art Invitational, Bank Negara Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Parallel Realities — Asian Art Now, Blackburn Visitor Centre, United Kingdom.

3 Young Contemporaries: 1997-2006, Valentine Willie Fine Art, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Satu Kali 1st Performance Art Symposium Malaysia, mfx & 67 Tempinis Satu, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

2005 3rd Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale 2005, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan.

Borders, World Social Forum 2005, Porto Alegre, Brazil.

2004 Homefronts, SENI, Singapore Art Museum, Singapore (Spacekraft project).

Regional Animalities, The Substation, Singapore.

Seriously Beautiful, Reka Art Space, Kelana Jaya, Malaysia.

Malaysian Art Now, National Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

2003 Newton’s Funfair, Reka Art Space, Petaling Jaya, Malaysia.

2002 Young Contemporaries 2002, National Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Urbanscapes, Grappa Soho, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Book of the Dead, Performance at Chow Kit Fest, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

2001 Open Show, National Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Climbing the Wall, MIA Art and Design Centre, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Comics?, Artscafe @ National Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Ctrl. Alt. Del., Rumah Air Panas, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

2000 Love on Paper, Valentine Willie Fine Art, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

1999 Aku’99, Galeri Petronas, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

1998 Human Expressions, Valentine Willie Fine Art, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

1997 3 Young Contemporaries, Valentine Willie Fine Art, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

1996 Crates Classified, GaleriWan, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

FA 1996 Diploma Show, GaleriMIA, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

1995 Young Talents, Bank Negara Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

AWARDS, GRANTS & RESIDENCIES 2017 S-Air- Second AiR artist residency, Sapporo, Japan.

2014 Re:Engage: The People’s Court (curated by Lee Cheah Ni), Georgetown, Penang, Malaysia.

Run & Learn, Japan Foundation.

2012 1 Shanthi Road Artist Residency, Bangalore, India.

2011 Finalist, APB Signature Art Prize 2011. Juried by Fumio Nanjo, Ranjit Hoskote, Gregor Muir, Tan Boon Hui and Hendro Wiyanto. Singapore Art Museum, Singapore.

2010 Artist residency in Pinyao, China.

Valentine Willlie Fine Art & Tembi Contemporary artist residency, Yogyakarta, Indonesia.

2008 JENESYS Program, Sapporo Artist in Residence & Japan Foundation, Tokyo, Japan.

WANAKIO, Meijima Art Center, Okinawa, Japan.

2007 Goethe-Institut Scholarship to learn German in Berlin.

Art as Environment in Tropic of Cancer artist-inresidence, Chiayi county, Taiwan.

Ujiae Art Studio Artist Residency, Gwangju, Korea.

2006 Rimbun Dahan Artist Residency, Rimbun Dahan, Kuang, Malaysia.

C21 Residency, Blackburn, United Kingdom.

PUBLIC COLLECTIONS Jeonbuk Museum of Art, Jeonju, South Korea.

Gwangju City Art Museum, Gwangju, South Korea.

Singapore Art Museum, Singapore.

National Visual Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Malaysia Central Bank, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The road to making this series and exhibition is one fraught with potholes, sharp corners and wrong turns.

Without the help of the following people to guide me along the way, I would have missed the path and ended up lost in the dark.

Thank you from the bottom of my well (private joke).

BERNICE CHAULY BEVERLY YONG CHEE SEK THIM IMAYA WONG JOSHUA LIM LEE WENG CHOY LIM SOK SWAN NIKKI ONG TEOH MING WAH WONG HOY CHEONG Yoong Chia, 22 Feb 2018

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A+ WORKS of ART A+ WORKS of ART is a contemporary art gallery based in Kuala Lumpur.

Founded in 2017, A+ WORKS of ART strives to engage contemporary practices and discussions in new media art, especially photography, video, Installation and performance art. While the main geographic scope of the gallery is Malaysia and the rest of Southeast Asia, it keeps its ears attuned to global conversations on social issues, critical imagination and material experimentation.

Collaboration is the key ethos of A+ WORKS of ART, based in the belief that wonderful things can happen when people share and exchange ideas. Artists working with gallery are not so much represented by the gallery but engaged in an ongoing conversation and collaboration. Likewise, curators, writers, collectors and galleries are welcome to initiate conversations about potential collaborations. The name, A+, refers then not just to the gallery’s strive for distinction and professionalism in its services and working processes, but also a sense of readiness to start a dialogue with any interested party.

Founded by Joshua Lim, who has decades of experience in the hospitality industry, A+ WORKS of ART represents a natural progression for the avid art lover. Lim has been an art supporter for the past decade through his ongoing art acquisition and his promotion of contemporary art in his network.

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CHANG YOONG CHIA HOW ARE YOU? I AM WELL EXHIBITION DATES 8 MARCH –— 7 APRIL 2018 A+ WORKS of ART d6-G-8, d6 Trade Centre 801 Jalan Sentul 51000 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia +6018 333 3399 info@aplusart.asia www.aplusart.asia fb/ig: aplusart.asia

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