The Night Migrations, Platform-L Contemporary Art Center, Seoul (2023)

Yahon Chang is a contemporary ink painter who transforms the Daoist and Zen Buddhist spontaneous brush painting and calligraphy practices of the Tang and Southern Song Dynasties into mesmerising artworks through performative movement. Drawing on Chinese and Zen (Chan) Buddhist traditions, he understands painting as an activity that connects the body, mind and spirit; his entire body functions as an axis for these expressive paintings, whose controlled energy is the product of decades of training in calligraphy and Chinese martial arts. His act of painting, which consists of drawing, dripping and even pouring the paint on canvas, evokes a phreatic zone or internal reservoir in each viewer’s mindscape.

In his performance works, Chang stands on large sheets of linen or Xuan paper and wields a brush almost as long as he is tall. The artist’s ink painting performance invites a sense of transcendence in the fluidity of space, embodying the feeling of being transported overflowing water to a place beyond the actual. As the performance progresses, fuelled by the centrifugal force that explodes toward exteriority and appropriates it, a dark maelstrom is activated that begins to flood the figures of sentient beings drifting on the painting’s surface. This act of painting performance imparts both motor memory and inner strength, so that in his seventies, Chang is stronger than in his youth.