Everyman

Catalogue Text

Melissa E. Feldman. MA in Art History, Independent curator and writer. Published: 2009. Piedmont, California.

Michael Chang came into my life suddenly and vanished as quickly. We met last August (2009) when he was in San Francisco producing aquatints at Crown Point Press for this exhibition. His timing was perfect—I was in town briefly between summer trips and was able to meet him the next day. (It’s a good thing too, because the prints—and the artist—were shipping out in two days’ time to Copenhagen.)

Arriving at Crown Point, a tall, dark-haired youngish man greeted me with an accent and a face I couldn’t place. He spoke English with confidence and apart from his height, Chang didn’t look particularly Scandinavian. He struck me as being a kind of Everyman, someone who could fit in anywhere, be it Lhasa or Manhattan.

We chatted and I asked a lot of questions and studied the prints, all aquatints in a minimalist style. Two of the series were complete: a handsome group of aquatint and chine collé, 77 by 55 cm, that starts out all white and ends, seven prints later, with an all-violet impression, and a smaller oblong series of four whose main drama is a diminishing midline dividing its washes of gray-greens and bronze, some in a striped moiré pattern befitting a Renaissance waistcoat. There was also an unfinished set of gridded variations on a squarish, book-size paper. This set was to be editioned; all the others are unique.

Chang showed me a digital image of an ambitious, 15 by 6-foot multi-panel painting, The Man Without Qualities (2009), that would accompany the new aquatints. This imposing work, a tour de force from what I could tell, comprises eight vertical panels, all 54 by 185 cm except for the central bone-white one which is a bit wider, and each painted a different muted red, green, yellow, purple and black. It resembles the American artist Brice Marden’s classic minimalist works from the early 70s (also oil and wax), yet it is less formalist and studied. Chang’s shifts in color seem more naturally occurring, an unforced sequencing that seems to mirror the shifting color of water under an overcast sky, or the way one thought leads—or leaps—to another.

Chang explained the meticulous coding system involving the number of staples attaching the canvas to the stretcher and how he works on them flat and selects a different brush size and directional stroke for each one. Yet when asked why he named the work after the novel by Robert Musil^[1] he said the title just seemed apropos though he had not read the book. By now I was beginning to grasp Michael Chang’s paradoxical approach: order colliding with chance and intuition.

It was completely by chance, for example, that he discovered the work of Brice Marden, one of the abstract American painters whose work was inspirational for him, and his first monochrome painting came about by accident. The monochrome stands as the ground zero of painting, a beginning and an end. That is how it went for Chang, when he made his first monochrome painting by inadvertently ruining his last—and he says best—figurative work.

In Chang’s native Scandinavia, figurative traditions prevail over abstraction, both contemporary and historical. Chang himself made figurative work until two years ago (2007). Vaguely surrealist, these earlier paintings feature an isolated figure or object, such as two fish trapped in a glass jar, set in a tonal background of uncertain depth.

Still, Chang’s abstract work bears a Nordic sensibility that can be traced back to the late 19th-century Scandinavian symbolists, whose most famous affiliate was Edvard Munch, in its reductive formal means and sense of interiority. Unlike the brilliant palette and empirical realism of their French counterparts, the moodier modernists in the North opted for Whistleresque tonal and monochromatic color, and flat, shadowless light.

As a cultural mistizo with a Danish mother, an Asian father, and a British education, his attraction to the monochrome begins to make even more sense. The idiom encompasses ancient archetypes and Eastern zen, modern architecture and Western doubt. This mutability, perhaps, accounts for its remarkable resilience.

Kazimir Malevich is responsible for its modern identity. Since then (1917) the monochrome has been adopted by artists working all over the world from the early Italian conceptualists Piero Manzoni and Lucio Fontana, to the heady meditations of Yves Klein, Yayoi Kusama, James Lee Byars, and Wolfgang Laib. It serves the deconstructivist investigations characteristic of Americans Robert Ryman and Ad Reinhardt. More recently, in the work of Glenn Ligon, Byron Kim and Alejandro Otero, the monochrome bears the inscription of identity politics. As a visual paradigm, it can be an image, a denial of imagery, a state of mind, an iconoclast.

“After more than 12 years of unsuccessful attempts at trying to find a connection to the art I felt that I was supposed to be making, I left Denmark and visited the USA for the first time.”^[2] That was in 2007, before Chang’s interest in abstract painting took hold. Chang’s story recalls Agnes Martin’s rite of passage from abstract expressionism to her mature minimalist style: “I painted for 20 years without painting a painting that I liked.”^[3] That is, until she got to New York and saw non-objective painting.

In the larger prints, Chang begins the series with lightness and darkness: a white image and a black one. The ones in between seem to build towards the symphonic finale, a bar code of irregular stripes comprising the colors—black, white, gray, and violet— isolated in the preceding prints. The white is actually an impression of the plate itself, including dirt and grease marks. The velvety bottomless black is the result of being “bitten” for two 50-minute sessions in an acid bath. The parameters of the printing process and visuality thus marked, the work moves into another basic measure of picture-making and seeing: dividing the plate equally between two blacks, whose difference is barely discernible, then two whites. Such subtle variations in tone are a specialty of aquatint. Then the violet makes its entrance in a cloudy monochrome.

The new works demonstrate the classic Minimalist penchant for subtle geometries that operate on a perceptual level, but Chang’s approach is more dramatic and free-associative. There is a baroque quality to the contrasting forms and divided surfaces, as well as in his use of scale and sequencing. There is a touch of romanticism in Chang’s color choice. (The artist likes to contemplate his work in different natural light, including moonlight.) For example, in the print with the two blacks and the print with smaller green/gold striped pieces in the oblong series, the tonal change comes across spatially, as if in bas relief, as well as pictorially in terms of color, hue, and pattern. One needs to shift position to determine whether external lighting accounts for the flashing stripes and shifting blacks or if these differentiations occur within the image itself. As always, the answer is yes—and no, in Michael Chang’s elusive, straightforward art.