In celebration of The Stallery’s 10th Anniversary, CHANG shares his artistic journey and undervalued passion for contemporary art. His newest exhibition, Artifice, encompasses the reality of duality, meditation, and tension—showcasing the raw nuanced visual world of the in-between. As a multidisciplinary artist born in the US and raised in Hong Kong, CHANG admits his artistic practice is moulded by his experiences with red-green colour blindness and his multicultural upbringing. He shares his personal struggles of living in between divergent worlds, honouring the friction and highlighting his creative process in an insightful Q&A.
Congratulations on your exhibition and The Stallery’s 10th anniversary, CHANG! Could you please tell us about yourself and how your artistic journey began?
Thank you! It’s surreal to be celebrating The Stallery’s 10th anniversary. It isn’t easy, but I’m proud to say that we’re still going strong.
I started in photography and graphic design, but it wasn’t until I began experimenting with silkscreen, sculpture, and painting that I really developed my own visual language.
My red-green colour blindness completely altered my visual world and pushed me to experience colour differently. Art became a way for me to understand the world—and for the world to understand me. It gave me structure and purpose during the dark times when I struggled with addiction.
My bi-cultural, multilingual upbringing taught me to navigate between different worlds—East and West; English and Chinese; tradition and modernity—this duality flows through everything that I create.
Can you describe your creative process?
For me, blending the traditional with the contemporary isn’t just a technique, it’s a reflection of how I exist in the world. I’ve always lived between cultures—East and West—and that tension naturally finds its way into my work.
My process usually begins with a concept or contradiction—something existential and uncomfortable. Artifice started with Chinese scholar’s rocks. I reinterpreted classical Chinese elements, like scholar’s rocks and traditional embroidery, using modern materials.
I pulled pop culture visuals that shaped my upbringing into conversation with tactile, time-honoured techniques like silkscreen, hand-stitching or bronze. I casted bronze sculptures of the bitcoin icon and used embroidery to mimic halftone screen prints. These combinations created a visual language of contrasts—ancient and contemporary, handmade and mechanical.
It’s like a translation. Each medium or symbol carries its own weight, and I like to experiment by combining these visual vocabularies—layering, distorting, and reworking them until they feel like they belong in the same universe. The goal isn’t to resolve the contrast, but to let the friction speak.
What message do you want the Hong Kong audience to take away from Artifice? What does duality mean to you?
Artifice is about the dualities that shape how we live today—authenticity and artificiality. These dichotomies are everywhere, especially in Hong Kong, where tradition and modernity constantly overlap. However, rather than trying to resolve these contradictions, this exhibition leans into them to facilitate the most honest reflections.
I hope my audience finds the space in my work to reflect quietly. We’re surrounded by haste, pressure, and simulation. But, Artifice offers us a moment to pause. How much of our lives are shaped by forces both man-made and deeply human? These pieces are meant to unsettle and invite introspection.
What motivated you to pursue your journey as a self-taught artist? What is the most important lesson that you have learned from your experiences?
My mother was one of my biggest inspirations, she was an artist herself. But, my journey as a self-taught artist wasn’t exactly by design—it was more out of necessity.
I studied art formally, but I dropped out twice. At the time, I struggled with addiction, and I also felt that the academic system just didn’t align with my mind. It felt rigid, quantitative, more about ticking boxes than exploring meanings. I left because I needed to find a path where I could learn on my own terms.
That decision forced me to confront my own limitations and motivations. Art became a tool for survival and healing, for making sense of a world that often felt too overwhelming. Over time, I built The Stallery—not just as a space to create, but as a space to connect, experiment, and grow with others.
The biggest lesson I’ve learned is that there’s no single path to becoming an artist. What matters most is honesty—in your process, message, and relationship with the work. It takes time and consistency to make that balance sustainable.
You need to practice patience and maintain a healthy state of mind. Otherwise, being an artist is impossible.
What are you most proud of and how long did Artifice take to create from brainstorming to execution?
Artifice has been a deeply personal and gratifying experience. The conversations it’s sparked about duality, authenticity, and identity have made me feel heard.
This project took a couple years to come together, from its earliest conceptual sketches to the final installation. But, the themes of Artifice—the tensions between worlds—are what I’ve wrestled with all my life. It’s baked into how I see the world and how I work across mediums.
I’m most proud of how this exhibition challenged me to evolve. For the first time, I scaled up embroidery as a central medium, bringing a different rhythm to my work. Slow, tactile, and deeply intimate, like a Buddhist meditation. Where silkscreen condenses months of labour in one moment, embroidery stretches time, emphasising patience.
It also re-centres the usually slow and time-consuming ancient Chinese art forms into a modern China which is speeding towards digital immediacy. The tensions between depth and surface—ephemerality and permanence—are central to Artifice. They mirror our own experiences in an increasingly digitised world, reminding us that the human hand is the origin of all creativity.
