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York Chang

@instayorkchang

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I’m honored and thrilled to announce that I was awarded a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship. Thank you to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation @guggfellows for this recognition. Excited to continue striving to live up to the Foundation’s mission “to pursue…creation in any art form, under the freest possible conditions,” a mission that takes on greater significance in a time when intellectual and creative life are under attack. It takes time and community to grow as an artist, and I’m so grateful for all of the members of my creative community, friends and family for their encouragement, dialogue, and support over the years. Congratulations to all of my fellow Gugg Fellows in the 100th cohort!
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📸 @evan_whale
#guggfellows2025
#yorkchang by @instayorkchang

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a year ago

I finished this new oil painting, titled “Precipice,” a few days before the LA wildfires, and a few weeks before the inauguration. The source image is a photo of family members awaiting news of their loved ones who were aboard the Malaysian airlines flight 720 that went missing in March 2014. It is an image of people waiting, anxious, unsure, undecided on what to do, or how to feel yet- in the liminal space between grief and horror, relief and agency. The image feels more and more resonant to me every day, as we experience this contingent moment, standing at the threshold of unprecedented, dark, and historical threats, feeling at once urgent and enraged, but also listless and in limbo, searching for the emergence of a path forward, a channel of resistance and resilience for our community and our nation in the layered catastrophes unfolding.
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#dontbelievehim #feelingthefight
#constitutionalcrisis #contemporarypainting #contemporaryart #contemporaryartist by @instayorkchang

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a year ago

Tactical Schematic, 2024
Acrylic and gesso on folded newspaper mounted on Arches paper
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#headlines #sculpture #contemporaryart #newspaper #origami #informationwarfare #artonpaper #memorypalaces by @instayorkchang

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2 years ago

Very grateful and lucky to have a chance to train with @elsesercristian - he’s pushed me to find a new level, with more fluid footwork and movement, clean groundstrokes, weight of shot, and match preparation. He was the fitness and movement coach for one of my all time fave pro players, the great Argentine champion Juan Del Potro at the height of his career, so I get the benefit of (and a few stories from) all of that history and experience. Cristian @elsesercristian recently moved to Sarasota, Florida, but still takes virtual clients, so if you want to improve your game with the best, DM him for more info, can’t recommend him more. 🙏 thanks for everything, Cristian! You’re costing me a lot now on broken strings but vale la pena! 😂 by @instayorkchang

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17 days ago

Camino (Glyph Series), 2022
Flashe paint, graphite, pastel
on cut Japanese kozo paper
11 x 8.5 in.

Permanent collection of the @sbmuseart Santa Barbara Museum of Art by @instayorkchang

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18 days ago

Sleepwalker (after Bolaño), 2026
Oil on linen on board
14 in x 17 in

“I went looking for ghosts at 3 am in the city / down the unlit alleys where the young poets got drunk on too much nostalgia / and fought like lovers / but the ghosts long ago grew tired of the avant garde / and gave up on the haunting / slipping back into the bars and nightclubs, into the bright kitchens,
into the laughter of the living / instead I found flowers, stargazers I think, or just some cheap lilies /
scattered across the broken asphalt like a dropped deck of cards / a minor constellation on the sidewalk telling a future I’d rather not know /
there are thousands of kilometers of streets left to walk / before sunrise”
#robertobolaño by @instayorkchang

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19 days ago

My first time in Venice- the opening week of @labiennale . The whole event exists in a strange and uneasy register for me: part pilgrimage, part spectacle, part geopolitical theater.

National pavilions competing for cultural relevance inside a city already saturated with the accumulated symbols of power, trade, and religion, collapsing under the weight of time- a historical city of reflection hosting contemporary art while sinking into oblivion. Outside the exhibitions: protests against genocide and the Israeli and Russian pavilions, luxury tourism, billionaires and their yachts, rising water, white supremacy, war, displacement. Inside: curators and artists trying, in radically different ways, to make sense of what it means to make art in the midst of it all. This year’s Biennale, titled “Minor Keys” brought forward peripheral voices — centering quieter histories of care and nurture, stitching together fragmented signals of resistance, finding pathways through unresolved tensions between the power and impotence of art. It was all more than a bit overwhelming. Congrats to friends and acquaintances who contributed to the story and substance of this year’s Biennale- @carolinacaycedo @galaporraskim fac @eirarakawa @jenniewking @jwest20011 @sarahannecooper

I was lucky to experience it with @lkroxana and @st__francis , who know the city from years on the Biennale circuit but who generously got lost with me in winding alleys that opened onto epic Byzantine churches steeped in devotional art and the collateral exhibitions scattered throughout the city, and in heavy conversations that unfolded over seafood, slow cooked risotto and well-chosen wine long after midnight. 🙏
#labiennale #labiennaledivenezia #contemporaryart
#wanderlust taken in Venice, Italy by @instayorkchang

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a month ago

Grateful for the opportunity to take part in SOMA Summer @somamexico , a month long artist residency in Mexico City. It’s a dream and a privilege to be able to immerse myself in this amazing city for an extended time, developing new work, sharing space and ideas with brilliant artists, curators and writers from all over the world. SOMA Summer is thoughtfully organized and led by artists, theorists, and writers like @yoshuaokon.studio @sara_red_eliassen @taniel70 eduardo abaroa @zingaronaz @sayakvalencia #somasummer #somamexico taken in San Miguel Chapultepec, Miguel Hidalgo by @instayorkchang

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a year ago

YC in the NYC
@guggfellows taken in Midtown Manhattan by @instayorkchang

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a year ago

Glad to contribute work to this @lacarchive project in the Reading Room at this weekend’s @printedmatter_artbookfairs titled 𝙵𝚒𝚡𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝙿𝚊𝚙𝚎𝚛𝚜 , a meditation on immigrants, their due process, and the stories woven and entangled within brutal and bureaucratic procedures. Do we see human beings or objects? An ongoing LA Contemporary Archive collection curated by @andrew_m_freire 🙏 Please go check it out this weekend at Art Center’s South Campus.
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#Repost @lacarchive
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Check out 𝙵𝚒𝚡𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝙿𝚊𝚙𝚎𝚛𝚜 a new collection at LACA and project in the Printed Matter Reading Room that focuses on how artists use bureaucratic materials to critique, research and examine immigration systems. 𝙵𝚒𝚡𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝙿𝚊𝚙𝚎𝚛𝚜 includes: optical illusions collaged with FOIA requests; Bracero Program video ad stills overlaid on work contracts; para-fiction and travel guides re-inscribed into passport pages; notes and voice memos around frustrations and stories regarding immigration status and visa applications. We invite you to browse and unfix these materials during your time at the fair.

Jennifer Teresa Villanueva (@jennifer__teresa)
Marcia Santos (@marcyyysantos)
York Chang (@instayorkchang)
Zermillion (@zermillion)
Andrew Freire (@andrew_m_freire)
Adriana Corral

📃 We welcome contributions to this collection. Visit us at LACA or get in touch over email.

📍 Art Center South Campus’s 950 & 870 S. Raymond Ave taken in Pasadena Art Center (South Campus) by @instayorkchang

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a year ago

Studio life / Shelf life
#wip / #booksinprogress by @instayorkchang

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a year ago

Recuerdo la luz en tu rostro (Habitaciòn 33), 2025
oil on linen
18 x 24 in.

When my friend @kelley_atelier saw this recent still life I painted, he said it reminded him of a “pillow shot” from Japanese director Yasujirō Ozu’s films. The seemingly random still footage between his films’ narrative scenes—of vacant corridors, empty chairs, distant landscapes—function as visual poetry, becoming vessels of profound emotion through absence rather than action. Pillow shots use the frame as a container where time is suspended, where feeling can accumulate to a level of emotional density that goes beyond narrative. The flower in Room 33 exists forever in my perpetual present, holding emotional memories with an intensity that can only come with restraint and quietude. Modern directors, including Terence Malick (The Tree of Life) and Richard Linklater (Before Sunrise), still use pillow shots in their films to evoke both transience and the depth of feeling over time.

At first, I felt self-conscious painting something as simple as a still life (or making any art) in this moment of perpetual political crisis. But the quietness of this work gave me a sense of unexpected urgency. The work isn’t trying to escape politics but engages it obliquely—not as a solution but as a necessary counterpoint to the clamor of weaponized chaos. When public spaces and our social media feeds overflow with propaganda and polarized imagery, a still life’s hushed attention to the overlooked feels radical and necessary right now, making precious fleeting moments more visible, more permanent. I want it to challenge the acceleration of political time by creating a space of contemplative slowness. It speaks to love and beauty’s persistence despite the ugly, cruel, belligerent politics of dominance and institutional collapse, and to intimate private domains beyond official misinformation. The painting’s stillness contrasts with the frenetic movement of political upheaval, and suggests those empathic values that we need to preserve and repair the social ties that bind us in order to survive beyond these moments of conflict and alienation.

#contemporarypainting #contemporaryart #ozu #pillowshot by @instayorkchang

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