#14_Chang Jia

Chang’s works may also be interpreted in the context of ‘becoming’ (e.g., ‘becoming a woman’, ‘becoming other) as expressed in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. According to Deleuze, ‘becoming’ is a moment of change and movement that is necessary to maintaining any intermediary or impending position. As a primary stage in the formation of differences, Deleuze’s concept of ‘becoming’ is a crucial aspect of any response to the inertia of the system, as well as the reshaping of identity logic according to the logic of difference. Perhaps Chang as the artist or Chang as the crazy woman represents this moment of change and intermediary stage. The gap (i.e., the difference) between the common notion of art and the reality of art is semantic and non-traversable, as is the gap between the social conception of insane behavior and the actual behaviors themselves. As such, perhaps both art and the activities of a lunatic may be equated, for both represent the need to redress difference by narrowing the gap.

Confess Your Sins! The Night of Bones and Flesh in Fire.

According to Michel Foucault, mental institutions were created to serve a dual purpose: to keep tabs on psychiatric patients, while at the same time keeping them isolated from the society that they might potentially disrupt. Notably, this concept invokes the notion of the impending: people who could potentially disturb society; who could potentially disseminate seditious thoughts; who could potentially distribute ethical desensitization; who are potentially anti-social; who are potentially psychotic. But of course, the potential is neither fact nor reality; it is always merely potential.

We must be alert to the scheme or routine of any system that surveils and controls not only reality, but even potential reality.

For once a system seeks to control both actual and possible events; nothing can escape it or exits outside its boundaries. In the past, the system sought control over people’s physical bodies, but today, the system uses the threat of observation to control the potential area of people’s consciousness. The system provides standards to dictate what is normal and abnormal, and then causes people to internalize those standards within their consciousness. Society merely provides the tools for surveillance, such as the definitions of the normal, the reasonable, the rational, and the prudent; by absorbing these definitions, it is we the people who eventually surveil ourselves. In such system, there is nowhere to hide, even for the unconscious.

In Chang’s piece I confess my sins (2011), the four words of the