Chang Yuchen: For those who share mornings and evenings

In Collaboration with Yuan Yi (1985-2014)

Smack Mellon, September 27-December 14, 2025, curated by Rachel Vera Steinberg

Smack Mellon presents an experimental project within Chang Yuchen’s practice, considering the effect of communication technologies as a way to explore distance and loss–of time, memory, and shared experiences. Presented in a two channel video installation with sound over five hours in length, this intimate work comprises selections from a database of screenshots captured by Chang’s late husband, Yuan Yi, as well as a dream archive transcribed by the artist a few years later. 

Filling a wall in the back of the gallery, the first video takes shape through thousands of low-resolution screenshots of the artist, mediated through a video chat window from the perspective of Yuan Yi, her late husband who passed away suddenly over a decade ago. Yuan obsessively documented their virtual intimacy in this way throughout the long-distance relationship the two shared. When seen on a single timeline, the rapidity and consistency of the images coalesce into a soft filmic narrative, capturing the longing across the temporal/geographic distances and the cursory nature of the communication medium. Vibrating with the poor image quality of screen grabs, now over a decade old, the subtle shifts in lighting and movement distribute broadly across exaggerated pixels. Sounds of the artist’s breath create the soundtrack, which is echoed in still moments when the artist sleeps or listens, where the only visible movement between frames is the subtle rise and fall of her chest. Yuan himself appears in blips—as both spectre and voyeur—where he occasionally grabbed an image of himself instead. 

Displayed on a monitor across the gallery, a text Chang recorded and later translated from ten dreams overlays slowed-down video footage also captured by Yuan Yi, itself dreamlike in its abstraction of light and dark. The two videos, which can’t be seen at the same time, do not explain one another but serve as counter balances, both extrapolations of distance and love as mediated by screens. The voyeur sits opposite to untranslatable interiority. Quiet, spare, and saturated with time in the shape of shared moments, Chang’s installation elucidates the bare potential of storage media, while gesturing to the mundane in-capturability of togetherness.

— Rachel Vera Steinberg

Special thanks: Huiqi He

中文