Yuchen Chang

Lives and works in New York, NY, USA

Artist statement

Since 2019, I've been composing a writing language for Malay with coral, which I collected from a small island in Malaysia. Ancient as a spoken language, Malay never had its own script. It was spelt with Arabic alphabet during the Islamization of Malay Archipelago, and with Roman letters since the 19th century as a result of British colonization. Ethnically and culturally, contemporary Malaysia is incredibly diverse, and it showcases a manifold, intricate and decentralized linguistic ecology, where the gaps in between incompatible tongues are often being rendered seamlessly, with gentle tonality, cooperative nodding and shared living experience. Humbled by the counter-movement between the epistemic violence and the linguistic resilience, by the fluid mentality which corresponds to the restless ocean waves, on which I was completely speechless with my learned languages, I started to invent a new one. I choose a hollow coral for “hunger”, a horizontal one for “sleep”, I draw shadows to make plurality -- following my private map of shape, sound and meaning, I weave a web that preys on name, thing, soul. In 2016, I launched the “brand” with a runway show. Under this umbrella, I produce useful commodities. Use Value believes art exists not only in museums but also in the mundane gestures of everyday life; Use Value measures artist's labor by the common rules of economic reality. The price of each product, the exchange value, is calculated by the average hourly rate of all...

Artwork