Hsia-Fei Chang Goodbye
Listen to the conference on France Culture Plus : Patrick Javault invites the France-based Taiwanese artist Hsia-Fei Chang to discuss the publication of Goodbye, the first book-length study of her work.
It features a number of texts by the artist read at performances or simply pinned to the wall at her exhibitions together with a wide-ranging selection of her works from 2000 to 2015.
The finesse of Hsia-Fei Chang’s artistic practice is apparent in the initial impression of airy nothingness that soon turns out to express terrible, because trivial, violence – the burden of ennui, the ridiculousness of habit – and the anxiety of solitude, love, lies, and betrayal. Her wit is not cynical or ironic, far from it: rather, it is funny, tender, humble. The artist does not set herself up as judge, nor does she give in to the temptation of facile sentimentalism. Hsia-Fei Chang is best known for her offbeat performances, sometimes verging on the trashy, as joyfully liberating as they are eerie. The audience is invited to read the artist’s own « novel ». Hsia-Fei Chang always starts from one unique narrative, evoking her own life or a media human interest story to pin down universal sentiments, thereby achieving the abolition of distance between her own narrative and her audience, between the individual who lived the story and the one now discovering it.
Hsia-Fei Chang was born in Taipei, Taiwan, in 1973 and lives and works in Paris.
Her work has been exhibited at the Maison Rouge (2012), the Wiels Contemporary Art Centre in Brussels (2013), the Casino Luxembourg, Meymac Contemporary Art Centre (2011), the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris (2010), the Vancouver Biennale (2009), the Taipei Biennale (2000), the Brooklyn Museum in New York (2007) and on several occasions at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. In 2015, the Nei Liicht Art Centre in Dudelange, Luxembourg, devoted the solo exhibition Worst Day of My Whole Life to the artist.