An Interview With Shea Chang

Shea Chang’s booth at Artist Project 2024.

When I first happened upon Hamilton-based artist Shea Chang’s booth at this year’s Artist Project, I was instantly struck by the esoteric quality of her oeuvre. Chang’s interdisciplinary practice is characterized by a bewitching approach to form that in some respects recalls the visual language of Tarot. And her penchant for appetizingly off-kilter palettes – made even more idiosyncratic and evocative thanks to the presence of a substratal ink or watercolour wash – suffuses the work with a compelling transitory feeling as hues shift and spread across the apparitional scenes she conjures.

Chang’s artist statement, which you can find on her wonderfully designed website, highlights how her creative navigation of the “spaces” between contrasting concepts – “control and accident”, for example – allows her to explore a host of themes both far-reaching and personal, such as her multi-racial and queer identities. Using a variety of mediums including metal, wood, paper, digital collage, and coloured pencils, Chang intuitively materializes and modifies shape and perspective, in turn dissolving the differences and negotiations between recollection and dreaming, existing and evolving.    

Chang, who is an Assistant Professor of Illustration at OCAD University, has also had a very busy schedule of late. Earlier this month, her team unveiled an outdoor wheat pasted mural featuring over 400-square-feet of illustration on the school’s campus, boasting the work of graduates from the 2024 OCADU Illustration Program. And she’s the inaugural participant in Toronto indie magazine shop Issues’ Artist in Residence Program curated by Regional Archive. Find her work there throughout the summer and take note of the artist talk she’ll be giving on Saturday, June 22nd from 6-8pm.

With all she’s got going on, I was especially grateful to Shea (who, on the second occasion I saw her at Artist Project, was wearing a fab jumpsuit from the brand Osei-Duro) for taking the time to speak with me about her entrancing work. Read on to learn more about her practice, why she’s drawn to the notion of tension, and what she listens to while she’s making art.

Shea Chang, Syzygy, 2024. Ink and graphite on cotton paper (11 x 14 inches).

Tell us about the foundation of your artistic journey.

Drawing was one of my first “languages” in the sense that I began doing it at an early age. I learned about the techniques of Chinese watercolour when I was young, and that informed how I came to define drawing because it’s not just about creating a line, for example, it’s about the gesture of creating it. In Chinese watercolour there’s also not really a division between drawing and painting as there is in the Western world. So, I was exposed to this idea first, but then I went through the Western canon art school system, starting in Foundation at Langara College in B.C., and then switching over to design and illustration.

I felt I was always in this cuspy world between art and design. I had discomfort about it in the beginning because I didn’t quite understand where my place would be, but over the years of trying different things, including editorial work and children’s book illustration, I learned to accept my artistic hybridity. And going to grad school reminded me, through all the research that I did, about the ideas behind – or philosophies of – East Asian art practices and the thinking that there’s no divide between drawing and painting. They can exist more fluidly.

I feel like this is really embodied in your practice because it includes such a diverse exploration of materiality. And I love that you used the word “cuspy” because your pieces have a real sense of movement that, to me, almost seems like a spirit is trying to come through; we can come back to that later! For now, let’s talk more about materiality and your approach. Do you have an initial idea for a piece and then think about how to express it, or are you inspired by the materials themselves?

It's a mixture of holding ideas in my mind – or holding certain intentions – at the same time as letting [a piece] just become. I start with washes first, trying not to force any preconceived kind of representation from that initial process; I let the water stains do their thing. Of course, there's a difference between when I’m applying the wash and its colour and what it looks like when it dries; and I’m often surprised by what I see after I come back to something once it’s dry. After that process is done, I look at what's there – and what those surprises have presented – and start to draw out certain things that I see.

I’m interested in chasing that notion of how drawing is a record of one’s “performance” in terms of making contact with a surface. No matter if it’s a really intentional performance or it's more haphazard – it's always a record of your effect on that thing.

Much of my work is a combination of a wash underneath, which is either ink or watercolour, and then pencil crayon and graphite. The reason I like pencil crayon and graphite is because you can push and pull with them. You can lay them down in an additive way, or you can subtract them. There's a kind interplay, almost like when you’re writing and using one word over another because it’s not quite right. There’s also a feeling that I’m teasing the image out, and that it's beyond my control. Perhaps that's where the sense of haunting, or trace, comes from.

I hope that by always trying to relinquish my control that it brings a sense of power and aliveness to the work itself. That means I must give a piece a lot of time, and sometimes I’m making twenty pieces at once. It helps me avoid working too intensely on one and becoming too controlling of it.

Shea Chang, The Grotto Paradox (detail), 2020. Acrylic paint on aluminum, plexiglass mirror, wood (approx. 24 x 24 x 6 inches).

Have you had to work at learning how to relinquish control?

While it was part of my training as an illustrator, it's working in a direct, or linear, approach that is a habit I've had to break – to work through my anxieties and strategize how to bring in more chance in a way that isn’t fraught, and instead has a lightness to it. I think this is something a lot of artists struggle with, in different ways.

But the sense that you picked up on earlier, like a piece is moving its own self in a way – I think that comes from the fact that once I start seeing forms, I'll start rendering them. Part of that rendering involves understanding light and shadow and dimensionality, and those kinds of techniques. But I'll always look for ways to subvert them. I’ll play with the idea of, what if this object is breaking through this wall, or this light is emanating from a point and reflecting onto the squiggly cloud next to it? It gives the sense that a piece is continuously becoming.

There’s also a feeling of transportiveness to your work that makes it feel interactive.

I love that. It’s something that I am aware of, and I hope that I can create an experience for people when they look at the work. Just as it’s a slow process to create it, it can take a few times of seeing a piece to feel a connection. A lot of people who end up collecting my work usually do so after a second round of seeing it. They need some time.

Shea Chang, Compendii (detail of work installed at Artist Project 2024, Better Living Centre, Toronto), 2024. Xerox and digital collage wheat paste mural (60 x 132 inches).

I wanted to talk about the piece Compendii, which you explained to my tour group during Artist Project. Can you share the story and process behind it?

It’s a wheat paste work that was generated from images I created on my photocopy machine. For this process, I’ll take some of my original drawings as well as objects – maybe something that I found in my yard, or sometimes it’s a personally significant object. In that piece, there's a motif created from my grandmother's fan. It was something that she used all the time that I ended up with, and it's very special to me.

The use of the photocopier’s scanner bed, in this case, is kind of an extension of my drawing. I’m really working with gesture as I’m moving things around while it's scanning. This creates a kind of glitch effect as well as a ghostly trace of the objects and my drawings.

“Spectral" is definitely a word that comes to mind when I’m looking at your work, and you even have a series called Spectres. Are you interested in learning about the supernatural and spiritualism? I recently watched a show and part of it was set in the 1890s and the characters kept having séances – now I’m like, how come nobody invites me to a séance?!

We should hang! I'm very interested in this – more so recently in my art practice. I have a complicated relationship with spirituality because I grew up in an evangelical Christian home, and I then I was an atheist for a long time. I came to learn that neither of those two extremes served me.

I've instead developed an interest in the work that Hilma af Klint was doing, for example – the idea of painter as a kind of medium. And I just read the Surrealist novel by Leonora Carrington called The Hearing Trumpet. I'm really interested in creatives who didn’t give a shit about whether people called them a witch, or thought that bringing this “hippie-dippy” stuff into an art practice made it less important. I like that those people were just going for it and diving into psychic exploration – it’s really exciting to me.

I do have a pretty deep relationship to psychedelics and mental traveling; that’s how I like to think of it. Maybe I'm more conditioned to access these things because of my upbringing or experimentation over the years – I don’t know. But I feel like I can bring out those kinds of different states or cosmic connections. Maybe that sounds cheesy, but there's something there that I really like tuning into either through my practice, or through my own personal philosophies.

Shea Chang, Spectre III, 2024. Ink and graphite on cotton paper (4 x 4 inches).

Speaking of mental traveling, what music do you listen to while you’re working on your pieces and how do you get into the zone?

I like to get into the present moment by meditating or lighting some incense, and I'm very careful about not changing my music once I've started something. I basically have a certain playlist that I’ll listen to until a piece or a series is done. Changing the music would change the mood; if I’m challenged by a piece maybe I’ll switch it up to find another direction to go in, but if things are going well, I don’t want to interrupt that flow.

The things I listen to are very far reaching; lately I'm into Boy Harsher, and lighter stuff like Toro Y Moi and Art Feynman. And then there’s psychedelic stuff like The Durutti Column; if I’m having a late, long night, that’s what I’ll put on.

Ok Shea, one last question. In your artist statement, you say that your “work takes shape between the spaces of control and accident, opacity and transparency, porosity, rigidity, alignment and disruption, seen and unseen….” What is it about juxtaposition and contrast that intrigues you?

These concepts are frictions. Sometimes we can look at them in a utopian sense of, how do we all get along? How do we cohabitate and create symbiosis? But I don't think that’s always possible, or even necessarily a good thing. And maybe this interest in tension also ties into me being a hybrid body.  

Two things can be true and yet be at odds with each other – and those frictions can teach us a lot about how to really look at and be more aware of our specificity.

This interview has been edited and condensed.