Theodore Chang: To Your Younger Self

Open letter to your younger self…

Haven’t you wished to be a child once again? Wouldn’t we all want to give some kind of advice to our younger selves? To be kinder? To be wiser? The first solo exhibition of Korean-American artist Theodore Chang explores these questions through a series of thirteen large-scale mixed-media paintings that take us back to the innocent, unrestrained and curious way in which we once related to the world. Paradoxically, the naïve and spontaneous quality of Theodore’s works also bears a conceptual component that reflects the artist’s mathematician mindset through which he compresses and digests the world into a series of abstractions.

All the elements of this exhibition from its title, to the artist’s intuitive working process and bold imagery, reflect Chang’s yearning for revisiting his childhood through a visual vocabulary composed of flattened and schematized shapes and fantastic figures. Chang is certainly not alone in this journey as the concept of the inner child, first proposed by psychologist Carl Jung, lies at the core of all sorts of therapy and meditation practices that intend for us to reconcile with the wounded little child living within us. However, rather than relying on these holistic methods, Chang recurs to his artistic practice as a means of lending visible the obsessions, inspirations, and fantasies of his inner child. Perhaps for this reason Theodore’s art is so accessible, intimate, and unpretentious. It brings to mind the many fictionalized stories all of us construct to make sense of our brightest and darkest experiences.

Interestingly, some of these seemingly unique stories or visual codes do not escape the influence of globalized culture. Experts say the look-alike figures children often sketch seem to reproduce stereotyped generic models that have been perpetuated for generations. For example, as the artist hinted at with the painting titled You, kids from different corners of the world and living in all kinds of constructions ranging from apartments to huts tend to represent houses and trees in the same way. While this type of portrayal has psychological and developmental ramifications, it also makes us wonder if individualism is only an illusion. Furthermore, here the artist chose to elevate one of the children’s favorite coloring themes into a large-scale artwork that challenges our preconceptions of what is to be considered mainstream and amateur art. At the end of the day, who decides what can be labeled as art? That is something Chang, a self-taught artist, certainly asks through this exhibition.

At the same time, in To Your Younger Self some works, such as She or Internal Conflict, are an homage to the legacy of the modern and contemporary artists that have influenced his practice, mainly Picasso and Basquiat. Notably, among many other formal and conceptual elements, both artists included a childlike aesthetic in their art. In particular, Picasso paid tribute to the vitality and inventiveness of childhood something that other modernist artists before and after him also treasured. “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child," Picasso once said. In works like Mythical Creatures or Dino Theodore echoes this sentiment and presents us with oil-crayon schematic sketches of dinosaurs and alligators which come from the many visual referents that inform his imagination. As part of this alternate reality, Chang frequently includes short phrases that provide us with a handful of clues to the artist’s stories and reveal his dark sense of humor. It is up to us to complete the plot line.

One can feel a certain degree of nostalgia in Chang’s exhibition which can be read as an illustrated open letter to the artist’s inner child. However, there is also an underlying critical commentary towards the emotional and idealized way in which we revisit our past or more often than not live in the future. Everything but today. Regardless of this, the works featured in To Your Younger Self carry a positive note and many of them make us smile. When looking at them one cannot help but wonder: If we look closely enough could we still uncover traces of the child we once were inside us? Chang’s answer seems to be YES. In the words of American author Tom Robbins: “It's never too late to have a happy childhood.”