Dog and Butterfly is Mike HJ Chang’s latest installation-exhibition, using the form and concept of his own artist studio in the middle of the gallery space. Drawing from his interest in installation and drawings, the exhibition showcases an idealised reconstruction of Chang’s studio. In bringing the artist’s studio, an archetypal closed private space, into a public venue, the dynamic of the interactions change, rendering the artist’s studio an art object, and not just a space of production. The artist’s studio is thusly also rendered a public stage, with an audience.
Titled based on common shapes that can be made through the art of shadowgraphy, the concept of the installation will reference ideas emerging from Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, which broaches the ideas of the perception of truth and reality. The workings of a camera obscura and its requirements, a dark room with a pinhole through which light emerges, will also be referenced. The exhibition will examine the idea of intimacy through a diagrammatical understanding of spaces in which light is reduced and excess information is slowly filtered out. It is, in essence, what the studio represents to Chang, a head that thinks and interacts with the external world.
Dog and Butterfly is part of Exploring the Artist Studio: Design, Form & Function, where, together with Merryn J Trevethan, via the outdoor House Under Four Flags (HUFF), the public is given access to the workings of the artist’s studio, and through it, the artist’s mind.
