CHANG Yung-Tsuen was born in Changhua, Taiwan in 1957. He entered the Department of Fine Arts at National Taiwan Normal University in 1957, won the Lion Young Artists Contest Award in 1980, graduated from the Department of Fine Arts at National Taiwan Normal University and started teaching in Art Division at Hsinchu Teachers College in 1981. In 1984, he resigned from his teaching job to participate in the exhibition Alien: Play of Space organized by Richard LIN. In the following year, he worked with TSONG Pu, Jun T. LAI, HU Kun-Jung, and other artists to organize Transcendent: Play of Space II together. Since then, CHANG Yung-Tsuen’s artistic practice has shown more variety which ranges from painting, installation, performance art, to public art, and he is also active in the fields such as poetry, music, dance, community development, social movement, and etc.

His major series works include: the watercolor painting series The Rising Civilization (1977- ) which features blue as the dominate color and uses geometric shapes to pile up a colorful and yet rhythmic city image; the Variations of Ink Painting Series (1984- ) which adopts the abstract ink-wash space installation to innovate the traditional ink-wash expression and presentation; the Abstract Energy Series (1990- ) which integrates painting, dance, music, ritual, and poetry into an interdisciplinary performance as an artistic expression of the artist’s creative energy and the self-transform of one’s life; the Home Land Series (1996- ) which features his observation on and interpretation of Taiwan’s geography and culture, using the parallel division of image, the accumulation of various materials, and the creating of texture to represent the multiplicity and the rich quality of Taiwan’s natural landscape; and the Community Concern and Social Movement Series (1997-2007) which documents the artist’s continuous participation in political activities or public welfare-related services as a social activist who is concerned about the general development of the society.

CHANG Yung-Tsuen boldly broke through and experimented with the material, technique, expression, and spatial composition of traditional ink painting in his Variation of Ink Painting Series in the 1980s. First, he eliminated the limitations of existing techniques. He took the “splash-ink” technique to the extreme on a long scroll of Xuan paper as he freely splashed ink on the paper to create large abstract ink stains. As for the use of material, Chang abandoned the uniformity of media and adopted the scroll concept of traditional Chinese painting; he rolled up the ink painting, placed it in an acrylic box, and pull out the center of the scroll, so the ink stains formed random and irregular patterns. Another one of Chang’s revolutionary creativity was to freely put together square acrylic boxes using of the style and installation method of Minimalism. The ink paintings transcended the boundary of two-dimensional and three-dimensional spaces, and Chang gave a livelier and free life to ink painting by creating a space full of visual rhythm and musicality.

During CHANG Yung-Tsuen’s college life, various surrealistic and realistic styles became a trend under the “Native Movement of Fine Arts.” However, he abandoned the depiction of rural scenery which was regarded as a popular theme at that time and focused on the city image in The Rising Civilization Series, using blue geometric shapes as the touchstone to start his artistic career. Later in 1983 when he held his debut solo exhibition, he met Richard LIN who had a fundamental influence on his artistic concept. He started liberating the works from the limit of canvas and painting frame, demonstrating and experimenting with multiple possibilities of the works’ “existence” and “variation” in the space. Since then, his artistic practice has changed from the two-dimensional to the real three-dimensional space. In his various experiments on the relationship between the ink-wash and the abstract, the finite and the infinite, or the regular and the incidental, the artist further explores the multiplicity in materials, dimensions, vectors, and perspectives. The process which creates infinite variations through the collisions between the shaped objects and the spaces are full of the sense of “action” – the physical practice and the spiritual transcendence. CHANG Yung-Tsuen thus develops a narrative where art is everywhere, can do anything, and contains everything. Starting from the created shape in his visual art work, he makes a further step in performance art, performing art, community development, and social movement while his presence is all over Taiwan.