Chang Yuchen: a dictionary, a loom, a manifesto, a note, a kite, a phone call, a class, a universe, an echo, a cube, a treehole, wrapping paper, 3 poems, 6 drinks, 7 letters, 20 snakes, 24 words on personhood, and my mom

Exhibition on view: June 17–August 30
Opening reception: June 17, 6–8pm, artist walkthrough at 7pm
Chang Yuchen in conversation with Ross Perlin: August 12, 6–8pm (learn more)

Printed Matter is pleased to present a dictionary, a loom, a manifesto…, an exhibition on the bookmaking practice of artist and publisher Chang Yuchen. Varied in subject matter, production method, and circulation strategy, Yuchen’s commitment to artists’ books remains constant across her explorations in drawing, writing, performance, textiles, and experimental pedagogy. For Yuchen, bookmaking serves as a vessel for her curiosities, as well as an ongoing exercise in thinking through materials, learning with the hand, and making meaning on the page.

a dictionary, a loom, a manifesto… gathers 18 publications produced by Yuchen between 2012 and 2026, accompanied by prototypes, editions, drafts, and failures, a presentation she has overlaid with her own handwritten reflections on her processes and sources of inspiration.

The installation is anchored by Yuchen’s long-term artwork Coral Dictionary, an iterative print, performance and drawing-based project that explores an original language composed by the artist from coral fragments encountered on a Malaysian island. Over the past six years, Yuchen has translated over 101 sentences from a Malay-Mandarin Chinese-English dictionary into drawings of coral, assigning meaning visually, metaphorically, and emotively in a process Yuchen calls her “feral literacy.” Spanning the gallery walls, a sentence from the series is realized by the artist as a painted mural.

Yuchen, who worked as a staff member at Printed Matter from 2013 to 2020, draws on her learning from years of immersion in Printed Matter’s collection and community. Yuchen sees the exhibition, hosted at Printed Matter as part of their 50th Anniversary celebration, as an opportunity for recalibration and the expression of gratitude:

“Initially attracted to the text and images presented in book form, my love gradually extended to the paper and binding that holds them together, and later, through my years working at Printed Matter, to the administrative and retail labor that circulates books and creates encounters. From content to substrate to infrastructure, this centrifugal love manifests in the various shapes and structures my books take, different choreographies of unfolding, as well as in their modes of distribution.”
— Chang Yuchen

About Chang Yuchen:

Chang Yuchen works in an interdisciplinary manner—writing as weaving, drawing as translation, teaching as hospitality, commerce as social experiment, and publishing as a dandelion spreading its seeds. Yuchen is also an advocate for the art of her mother, Jin Mei.

Yuchen is a recipient of the Princeton Arts Fellowship, the New York Public Library Picture Collection Artist Fellowship, the Queens Art Fund New Work Grant, the The Poetry Project Curatorial Fellowship, the Huayu Youth Award, and the Luminarts Cultural Foundation Fellowship, among others. She has shown and performed her work at MoMA PS1, Walker Art Center, Pioneer Works, Beijing Commune, the High Line, Carnegie Museum of Art, Amant, Artists Space, Para Site, and Tai Kwun Contemporary.

She has been an artist-in-residence at Triangle Arts Association, Smack Mellon, Asymmetry Art Foundation, MASS MoCA, the Museum of Arts and Design, and the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop. Yuchen has written for publications including Heichi Magazine, Press and Fold, Art in Print, and Randian, and currently teaches in the Dance MFA low-residency program at Bennington College.