Chang Chia-Ying: born in Taipei in 1982, graduated from the Tainan University of the Arts Graduate Institute of Plastic Arts. Her works often use the theme of famous children’s sayings from East and West. Within her exquisite paintings, images always have several meanings, and are intertwined within an impossible space. She has given solo shows in many key art spaces, including the Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taitung Art Museum, Gwangju Museum, Korea, and she has participated in many joint exhibitions both within Taiwan and abroad.

Chang uses her individual linguistic system to embed a series of hints and clues in hand-written scrolls and manuscript fragments displayed in the cabinet, performing an invocation ritual through a pseudo-antique style and telling the history of people warring for the Aura stone. The story is enshrouded in a mixed look comprising medieval and contemporary elements, signaling history’s recursive path in the development of human civilization. This fantasy world which seemingly departs from reality, implicitly reflects the collective subconscious. The protagonists depicting in these portrait-like paintings remains unchangedin these paintings is the look in their eyes – a detached gaze into an emptiness and penetrates the minds of the viewing, baffled spectators, inviting their personal observations and readings. The shadowing ambiguity is metaphorically charged – this creepy world brimming with signifiers awaits spectators to fill in their own interpretations.

In between reality and dreams, Chang puts on a pink tweed ritual cloak and silently evokes the surging undercurrents of absurdities in a prismatic crystal ball before her, exposing the ever-present subconscious – sweet-looking on the outside and wise, sophisticated on the inside, the founder of “HA.HA.” has arrived.