My work foregrounds preservation as a process of recovery that momentarily creates time and space for impermanence to be experienced and understood. Preservation breaks the linear perception of time by inserting delays and reversals within our individual and collective histories, temporarily enabling a window to observe transformation as a perpetual cycle of multiple beginnings and endings.
In my studio, I regularly shuffle through a photo archive of memories from my analog adolescence to my digital present. Informed by a diverse range of religious, agricultural, museological, and data preservation practices, flat images serve as both source and material for the creation of precarious conditions, often contextualized within temporal installations that suspend states of transition. For example, some images are selected to be embalmed in wet clay while others are excised and inked to produce high-contrast impressions on clinical drape sheets that are draped upon hand-woven drying racks.
Through the performance of preservation, my images, objects, and installations offer a way of seeing and living with transformation while training the senses to recognize the folly of permanence.
Takming Chuang is a multidisciplinary artist who explores the interplay between preservation and impermanence. His prints, photographs, sculptures, and installations have been featured in exhibitions at SculptureCenter NY, White Columns NY, Hessel Museum of Art NY, Camden Arts Centre UK, Headlands Center for the Arts CA, the Berkeley Art Museum CA, among others. He received an MFA from UC Berkeley (2017) and a BA in Economics (2000) from SUNY Binghamton. Born in New York City (1978), Chuang lives in San Francisco and works in Oakland.
Contact
tak@takmingchuang.com