Chang Yuchen: Coral Dictionary Vol. 1: 2019-2022

April 28, 2023 – April 28, 2023
8:00 pm
Artists Space

11 Cortlandt Alley
New York, NY

Chang Yuchen, Coral Dictionary Vol.1: 2019-2022, 2022. Published by Gong Press, 2023. Image courtesy of the event organizer.

Chang Yuchen, Coral Dictionary Vol.1: 2019-2022, 2022. Published by Gong Press, 2023. Image courtesy of the event organizer.

At the book launch for Chang Yuchen’s Coral Dictionary Vol.1: 2019-2022, co-hosted by Gong Press, Yuchen and friends will present a performative lecture on her feral literacy, while demonstrating how to read, use, and dance with this newly-published dictionary.

Including 216 words that Chang Yuchen has translated with fragments of coral bodies, Coral Dictionary Vol.1: 2019-2022 is a tool book custom designed for one person’s need in her ongoing endeavor of making a language.

Coral Dictionary Vol.1, 2019-2022 will be available at the event, and can be purchased online through Gong Press’s website.

Chang Yuchen works in an interdisciplinary manner – writing as weaving, drawing as translation, teaching as hospitality, commerce as social experiment (see Use Value) and publishing as a dandelion spreading its seeds. By constantly entering and exiting each medium, she strolls against the category of things, the labor division among people. Yuchen was a recipient of Kahn | Mason SIP Fellowship, Poetry Project Curatorial Fellowship, Huayu Youth Award Grand Jury Prize, Ruth and Harold Chenven Foundation Grant and Luminarts Fellowship. She has shown/performed her work at UCCA Dune, Power Station of Art, Para Site, Taikwun Contemporary, Artists Space, Abrons Art Center and more. She was an artist in residence at MASS MoCA, Museum of Art and Design, NARS x Governors Island, Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, Textile Arts Center. Yuchen has written for publications including Heichi Magazine, Press and Fold, Art in Print, Randian, and she lectures/teaches at Yale University, University of the Arts, Center for Book Arts, Printed Matter, among others.

Gong Press is a publishing project by Qianfan Gu (based in New York), St. Jiu (based in Beijing), and Yuki He (based in New York). We produce art publications in collaboration with our artist friends. The project is named after the weapon “GONG (弓, bow)”: like a bow without an arrow, Gong Press exists in a state of quiet and dormant potency, ready to be activated through creative collaborations.