About — Michael Baastrup Chang

Born:
16 December 1973, Skanderborg, Denmark
Nationality:
Danish-Korean
Based in:
Copenhagen

Michael Baastrup Chang is an abstract painter and visual artist whose practice includes painting, works on paper, printmaking, and installation. He hand-mixes pigments and prepares supports using his own priming methods. His work engages materiality, colour, memory, and dogma-based systems.

Biography

Born to a Danish mother and Korean father, Chang studied visual arts in London (Central Saint Martins) and established his studio practice in Copenhagen, making his debut in 2008. Over the years he has exhibited in galleries and art spaces in Denmark, Sweden, the US, and across Europe. He writes on art and has contributed essays on subjects such as collaboration, abstract painting and colour theory.

Reading the work

Shortly after Michael Baastrup Chang began exhibiting his paintings, he also began writing about his work. The essays are part of the work, not commentary on the work.

"Though Korean culture is an ancient mystery to me, it is a mystery in which I form a part." - Michael Baastrup Chang, A Collection of Essays on Art (2010-2013)

The essays were originally written as letters to fellow artists and friends, but over time they became part of a larger body of work consisting of paintings, drawings, prints, residencies and exhibitions.
Although these activities appear in different forms, they repeatedly return to a recurring inquiry: Why do we make art?
The purpose of this question is not to arrive at an answer. Instead, it functions as a vehicle for continuation, exploration and repetition.
Many works and essays can be understood as different approaches to this inquiry. In On Numbers (2012), drawing is described as an attempt to recover the openness and universality of childhood mark-making through the use of numerical systems. A decade later, the exhibition Graphite (2022) returned to Chang's earliest childhood sketches, presenting graphite as both a material and a point of departure for artistic investigation.
The participatory work Y (Why?), presented in The Journeyman (2011), invited visitors to contribute their own marks and questions to a large blackboard installation. The work extended the inquiry beyond the artist, transforming the exhibition space into a shared site of reflection and mark-making.
Questions of identity emerge in a similar manner. In On The Korean Alphabet, Grammar and Grey Areas (2013), Korean culture is described not as a fixed inheritance but as an ongoing mystery. Growing up in Denmark with a Korean father and Danish mother, Chang approaches cultural belonging as something explored through curiosity rather than certainty.

This body of work is best approached not as a collection of separate projects, but as a series of interconnected attempts to engage with the same enduring question. Viewed together, the paintings, drawings, prints, exhibitions and essays do not present a single answer. Rather, they document a sustained inquiry that produce new relevant questions pursued across different media and over an extended period of time.
The essays are arranged chronologically, with their titles accompanied by the date they were first published.

Materials & Process

Primary media: chalk, egg tempera, oil paints, graphite, and beeswax. All oil paints are mixed by hand from raw materials. Supports and canvases are primed by hand using his own methods tuned to the medium.

Selected Exhibitions (from CV)

See the full CV for complete exhibition history, residencies, and bibliography.

Selected Works (Examples)

Representation

Represented by: Galleri Weinberger Schandorff, Copenhagen.
Source: artfacts.net