Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture

Comments on the Finalist

Chang, Li-Ren’s work has pioneered a new track of criticism of consumerist imagery. His resistance to the media bazaar of the society of the spectacle comes neither via boycott nor indulgence. Instead, he uses everyday materials and techniques to reproduce professionally produced media. These reproductions then ingeniously become a means of extending a different kind of rush, effecting a transformation of the paranoid and obsessive-compulsive aspects of the rush of consumption. The works clearly use the symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder to exhibit a potential for consumption, and viewers may well get caught up in it. Consumption is simulated in a sort of mirror image, and it is from here that the artist’s true images begin.  ( Committee member/ Huang, Jian-Hon )

Artwork Introduction

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2009-The 8th Taishin Arts AwardFinalists    

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Chang, Li-Ren[ Irdina-A Solo Exhibition by Chang, Li-Ren ]    

Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture

Three years ago, Chang exhibited his handmade cotton pillows with decorative patterns that were shaped like tanks, rockets and various other weapons to show the ridiculousness of war. However, during that exhibition, he realized his work did not lead to further discussion, so he sold it all and donated all the profits to support a little Bosnian girl named Irdina.

For the Irdina exhibition, Chang has crossed the barriers of ethnic culture and regional space to pursue social politics. He displayed their written correspondence from 2006 to 2008, plus recorded films, animation, paintings, and documents. At the beginning, the letters were written by Irdina’s mother, but as she got a bit older, she did the writing. The letters discussed family, school life, the current appearance of the city, etc.

The exhibition contains seven parts. The Rescue Plan included turning over the profits of the pillows to the girl, which made the value of the project extend into real life, and taking it further into a nurturing pen-pal relationship, the “Irdina steps.”

A small monitor placed in a picture frame showed a computer animation (2008-2009) that was derived from a Japanese baseball-guessing game and which allows for the audience to relive the classical experience of looking at the image of beauty from famous Western paintings. Music and animation could also be downloaded via Bluetooth onto the viewers’ personal cell phones. In Chang’s digital videos, he makes the ambiguous connection between live weapons of war and violence in computer games.

With Irdina, Chang is thinking about how to broaden his art by making his project influence the world, rather than just appear at a moment in time as an isolated exhibition.

About the Artist

Chang, Li-Ren was born in Taichung in 1983 and is currently studying at Tainan National University of the Arts.

Chang wrote: “I had a dream that someday I will become a member of the United Nations Peacekeeping troops. Meanwhile, due to the isolation that Taiwan has suffered from within the international situation, the dream is impossible. I am like Don Quixote, who had dreamt the impossible dream. I intended to execute a rescue operation … I just hoped to accomplish a heroic deed that demonstrated to the public a cozy story, therefore the hope of believing something special could be shaped in every single soul.”