Thomas Chang
My creative practice is driven by an enduring joy—one that lies in imagining, making, refining, and sharing. It’s an obsessive joy, the kind that lingers, that scratches at the edges of my mind, demanding more.
Before my teenage years, I encountered Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles and Bernard Cohen’s Blue Spot. I didn’t know their names, their histories, or their importance, but I saw something in them—a kind of permission. An invitation to make a mess, to embrace absurdity, to let control slip just enough for something unexpected to emerge. At the same time, my parents were embedding something different in me: my mother, a relentless sense of care and generosity; my father, a fixation on detail so meticulous it bordered on obsession. Together, they taught me a paradox—that there is always a “better way” to do things, even when embracing chaos.
This contradiction drives me. I build systems—meticulous, calculated, deliberate. But within them, I let things misbehave. My work, spanning film, animation, drawing, painting, assemblage, and sculpture, is a negotiation between control and entropy. It manipulates function, twists perception, asks not just how something looks, but how it deceives, disrupts, unnerves.
I construct order. I dismantle it. I direct, edit, and iterate—gestures, marks, images, objects—until an internal logic emerges. The scale of this logic warps to fit its vessel: cafeteria trays, 4/4 time signatures, five-gallon buckets, 9,088 square inches of unstretched canvas.
During my undergraduate career, I filled cafeteria trays with objects that didn’t belong—cigarettes, condoms, cold hot dogs wrapped in discarded plastic mesh. The trays, designed for order, absorbed them effortlessly. The compartments welcomed their filth, their awkwardness, their displacement. The objects took on new significance, momentarily transcending the mundane. And in that moment, I saw it—the power of containment, of misplacement, of twisting function into something unrecognizable yet eerily precise.
I am drawn to this tension. The careful misplacement of familiarity. The slow corruption of utility. So much of what we create is swallowed by normalcy, diluted into background noise. My current work pushes against this, using 52 five-gallon buckets as both substrate and container for a series of experiments, devices, systems, stories, and manipulations. It does not resist normalization—it lets it fester, mutate, reroute. It branches laterally, growing like an invasive species, reminding us that the overlooked, the discarded, the perfectly ordinary is never as simple as it seems.
