On Saturday, April 27, the painter Fran Chang (1990, Poços de Caldas, Brazil) opens her first exhibition at Millan. Entitled Zenith, the show consists of around ten new paintings, all created over the last few months.
The artist, who has delved into the study of astronomy, showcases works inspired by a recent trip to Norway, where she witnessed natural events such as the aurora borealis. In these paintings, she links the cosmos with icy and barren landscapes, which fuel existential meditation.
This visit to the Nordic country is translated into detailed and airy paintings, in which celestial elements such as comets, shooting stars, rainbows, northern lights, mist, moons, and suns are featured more prominently. Yet, Chang has no scientific commitment towards their representation, in fact, she portrays dreamlike or extraterrestrial environments — indicative of the personal nature of her work.
Zenith ponders on classic art and philosophy subjects, with landscapes evocative of the sublime, showing humanity’s smallness in face of the universe. Nevertheless, the artist now brings these debates into the present day, drawing from events in her own biography and to the isolated contemporary life.
Silk, chosen as support for her paintings, is also the fabric that her mother, a Taiwanese who immigrated to Brazil, used to sew her own clothes. In addition to providing transparency and lightness to the works, silk is also an affective, political and social tie to the East Asian region. In this sense, the placidity of Chang’s landscapes also seems to speak to the Chinese artistic tradition.
Zenith features the latest developments in Fran Chang’s ongoing research. Her work, demanding of an extended contemplation, addresses questions of belonging, diaspora and loneliness, in a way that moves from the most personal to the global with both a diaphanous beauty and the seriousness required.
“Patient and silent, Chang’s works aim to externalize emotional atmospheres with disciplined and honest posture towards painting itself”, writes Mateus Nunes in an essay accompanying the exhibition. “The choice of silk as a painting support came about by always finding herself surrounded by this fabric at home, as her mother, even before immigrating to Brazil, favored it in sewing her own clothes in a libertarian Taiwan. As for the reverence to Chinese artistic traditions, Chang approaches the rigor of the gogbi technique, especially in the detailed brushstrokes with realistic intention. The choice of contemplative landscapes approaches the shan shui tradition, in which mountains, streams, and waterfalls are depicted, with sensitivity to capturing the rhythms of nature, energetic fluidities, and the radiant possibility of the soul.”
