A digital archive of Asian/Asian American contemporary art history

Chang, Rutherford

Other Names: 張能傑

Artist Website

"I create works in various media by re-arranging cultural products through simple conceptually based processes. Being especially obsessed over the newspaper in the current political setting, many of my recent projects are compulsive re-constructions of either the newspaper itself, or the facts that perpetually define our political and cultural consciousness through the newspaper. Using techniques that seem archaic in contrast to the technological means of information exchange we are accustomed to, I render the political vocabulary of our newspaper into abstraction. In my working method itself, I distance myself from overt political positions. I make few choices regarding meaning or aesthetics beyond following a deliberate, and often repetitive and labor-intensive process, which to me is something between meditative and purely menial, much like any daily routine. When working with the newspaper, this impartial process creates a new product composed from our familiar political vocabulary, but removed from its customary semantics, forcing a reconsideration of everything taken for granted in our banal reading of the newspaper and beyond."

Rutherford Chang, Artist Statement, 2003

Gallery of Selected Works