2025: Johnny Chang
Johnny Chang (b.1988 US-TW/SE) is a Stockholm-based interdisciplinary designer, artist, and researcher working across visual communication, graphic design, publishing, lecture performance, and writing. His practice engages with the sense-making (and breaking)—or poetics—of visual language and material culture, nourishing collective capacities for sensing, feeling, and being.
Chang’s artistic practice and research attends to questions of care, access, and tactics for gathering, listening to resilient knowledges from below that emerge from diaspora liminality, community memory, and social movement archiving. Through a citational practice, he works with the re/de/composition of material and symbolic-discursive residues to reflect on conditions and processes of social reproduction and relation.
As part of the PARSE Practitioners Programme, he will continue to develop Moving Heaven and Earth, an ongoing artistic research which examines tensions between conviviality and complicity in the wake of colonial dislocation. Its first iteration took the form of a communal offering—a temporary refuge of holding-feeling together through retelling food stories which hold both struggle and joy across Pan-Asian diasporic experiences in Sweden. Presented as an installation and sound work, it was exhibited at The Art of Conviviality Memory Studies Association Nordic’s Biannual Conference in October 2024.
Staying with food as a field of boundary objects and practices, the continuation of Moving Heaven and Earth weaves through global/local logistics, micro-routes, phantom roots, and both everyday and spiritual food practices, along with their visual and material vernaculars, to inquire into social formations of family, community, and broader affinities. In particular, Chang will engage with research materials that trace microhistories of everyday and radical resistance against colonialism and state violence in Taiwan and among its diasporas.
Chang has been an artist-in-residence with Transgenic HKI 2021 (Strelka Institute/Iaspis/HIAP), Grafikens Hus Samlande tankar/Collecting Thoughts 2022–24, and the IASPIS Istanbul Exchange Program in collaboration with Salt in 2024. He runs the graphic design studio livingwithimages.info, and co-organises the mini culture house and community library Munnen, the slow publishing collective Wake Up, and the occasional publishing imprint (Something) Something. He is part of the artist collective Grounding Future(s) and was a member of the separatist biopic artist collective Brown Island. He maintains an occasional teaching practice, lecturing at KTH, Stockholm University, Konstfack, and Linneaus University.