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.

The way CHANG Yung-Tsuen completely deconstructs and reverses the ink-wash conventions is to break through the limitation of techniques and materials, while he also integrates the artistic qualities of installation, land art, and environmental art, creating infinite possibilities within the three-dimensional spaces. He does not limit himself in the use of ink-wash. The free splashed ink is combined within the western design concept which bases on geometric shapes such as dot, line, plane, circle, triangle, curve, and etc. Sometimes he only uses paper and ink instead of brushes to create a flowing image which is like the churning sea of ink on large Xuan paper, which is as long as dozen meters or even more than a hundred meter, through his movement. Sometimes he arranges the space as an installation work, creating a fluid state of infinite extension and variations toward multiple directions. This work perfectly represents all the experimental qualities mentioned above.

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.