Wen-Han Chang
October 11 – January 30, 2019
Reception date January 30, 2019 6:30 - 8 PM
Statement
Strange World
The World We Never Know.
No one can be exempted from the need of sleep. In sleep, we are restored and refreshed while suspending between bodily functions and consciousness. We do not know what was happening when lying asleep. Further, those almost in trance are cut off from the reality. What is the relationship between the actual world and the realm reigned by Hypnos?
As a photographer, the camera was applied to expend my vision. It record what was going on when I was in deep sleep and visual sensation was closed. The camera lens was set up to focus on the surroundings such as ceilings, walls, and corners of my room. The shutter of camera would take pictures when I was not awake. When my perception was limited and cut off from the usual, the camera started to see, to reveal the world I never saw.
Every day and every night several kinds of light, came from the street-lamps, headlights and so on, went through the windows and reflected around. Rays of light implied that something travelled through time and space. The light caught by my camera left a stroke, a layer on the film. In other words, something or someone passed by, but their traces entered my room, and being record by my camera.
Layers of light, from the world we are familiar, accumulated on the film, and thus developed an unfamiliar world. In a parallel, we are strangers to the world during our sleep. By the use of camera, the time of sleep could be collected as remains of light and colors. As a result, a strange, yet fantastic, world to all would be created and become visible
Bio
Wen-Han Chang was born in Kaohsiung, a southern city of Taiwan, in 1982. His journey into photography began in university. While doing his BS in physics, he studied light, and was fascinated with laser photography and optics. Soon, he found that he loved photography more than physics, so he decided to forfeit his masters degree in physics.
Time went on until the 2008 financial crisis, he was laid off from an engineering job and left nothing except his camera. In order to try if the career of photography could be continued, he signed up for the 2008 EPSON contest, of which the judges were all Japanese, including Daido Moriyama, Mitsuo Katsui, and so forth. The first prize came when he almost gave up taking photos. Following that, more try rewarded him with international competitions and prizes, such as PX3 and IPA.
From 2009 to 2017, he worked as a medical photographer. The work led him to a professional field consisted of photographing procedures, such as heart surgery, and documenting patients’ visible symptoms. The work was fascinating, but didn’t satisfy his artist’s soul. Therefore, he quitted his job in 2017 for his true passion, abstract photography. Now, he is studying MFA in Photography at School of Visual Arts, continuing his exploration of time, light and space through photography.
