Chang Wen-Hsuan
Born:
Taiwan
Lives in:
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Location
- Lewers: Penrith Regional Gallery
Chang Wen-Hsuan is a Taiwanese artist, writer, and educator whose practice resides at the intersection of contemporary art, historiography, and pedagogy. Her work interrogates the narrative structures of institutionalised history, aiming to expose the power dynamics embedded in dominant historical accounts. Working across installations, moving images, and lecture-based forms, she constructs metafictional spaces where skewed documentation and first-person accounts are activated, allowing history’s unrealised potentials to be re-read, re-written, and re-imagined. In 2018, she launched Writing FACTory, a long-term virtual factory that manufactures tactical forms of publishing as political and pedagogical practices.
Chang Wen-Hsuan, The Compendium of Autobiographies, 2016–2026. Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney with generous support from Taipei Economic and Cultural Office, Sydney and the exhibition project Discordant Harmony. Courtesy of the artist and Chien Po-Hsun, Tseng Yen-Ting, Chiang Tao, Su Beng, Ding Ming-Qing © Chang Wen-Hsuan. Installation view, 25th Biennale of Sydney, Rememory, 2026, Lewers: Penrith Regional Gallery. Photograph: Maja Baska.
Chang Wen-Hsuan, The Compendium of Autobiographies, 2016–2026. Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney with generous support from Taipei Economic and Cultural Office, Sydney and the exhibition project Discordant Harmony. Courtesy of the artist and Chien Po-Hsun, Tseng Yen-Ting, Chiang Tao, Su Beng, Ding Ming-Qing © Chang Wen-Hsuan. Installation view, 25th Biennale of Sydney, Rememory, 2026, Lewers: Penrith Regional Gallery. Photograph: Maja Baska.
Chang Wen-Hsuan
Born 1991, Taiwan
Lives and works in Amsterdam, Netherlands
The Compendium of Autobiographies 2016–2026
documents, publications, stationery, file folders, audio-visual
installation
Installation Design: Chien Po-Hsun
Lighting Design: Tseng Yen-Ting
Sound Design: Chiang Tao
Consultant: Su Beng, Ding Ming-Qing
Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney with generous support from Taipei Economic and Cultural Office, Sydney
Courtesy of the artist and Chien Po-Hsun, Tseng Yen-Ting, Chiang Tao
Taiwanese artist Chang Wen-Hsuan is dedicated to interrogating the narrative power of accepted historical structures through the re-reading, re-writing and re-presentation of tensions embedded in canonical histories. Her new theatrical installation The Compendium of Autobiographies is inspired by the artist’s time working as assistant to Su Beng (1918–2019), a historian and activist for Taiwan’s independence movement.
Taking the history of the Taiwanese Communist Party and its co-founder Siā Soat-hông as a starting point, The Compendium of Autobiographies explores the paradoxes within Siā’s autobiography, official records and various other historical accounts. For Chang, the narratives about her life were not merely scripted by their authors but shaped by class struggle, gender inequality, and ideological conflict, thus embodying the complexities of Taiwan’s broader colonial history. Delving into the alleged boundary, or lack thereof, between fact, fiction and first person, The Compendium of Autobiographies questions the ways in which history informs the direction of the future dynamics.
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