Written by Yi-Cheng Sun; translated by Yi-Yu Lai.
Image credit: Wei-Lun Chang was not only the initiator of the “Art Petri Dish (A.P.D) Project” in 2017, she’s also an artist-teacher in this project. Photo courtesy of Wei-Lun Chang.
Before my interview with Wei-Lun Chang, I felt isolated and distant from her previous paintings. However, I experienced a contrasting feeling upon entering her home on the interview day. The toys in the corner and the children’s graffiti scattered around the walls made me feel the presence and interdependence of growing lives in this space. Wei-Lun’s role is not only that of an artist and educator, as I knew her to be, but also that of a mother––the mother of two children. The role of motherhood always brings significant changes, growth, and understanding in the continuous process of life, and Wei-Lun’s life journey is no exception.
Before discussing any of the topics I had anticipated, including art education and art creation, Wei-Lun mentioned her children as the source of her inspiration. The concepts of “dialogue,” “diversity,” and “originality” that she values the most actually stem from her interactions with children. The experience of parenthood and motherhood is not merely a turning point in her life but also a rebirth. Since her daughter Lele was one or two years old, she has been very talkative, and they have had countless dialogues and exchanges. Wei-Lun was impacted by the realisation that a child could possess strong energy and her daughter’s unique and diverse worldviews. These revelations caused significant shifts in Wei-Lun’s viewpoint.
Furthermore, in the conversations with her daughter, Wei-Lun realised that the relationship they co-shaped provided an effective pathway for her to develop a deeper understanding of herself and the external world. This allowed Wei-Lun, who had been raised as an only child and was accustomed to working alone as an artist, to develop an understanding and belief in another type of relationship. As her experiences and beliefs were not entirely clear then, they became more apparent and well-defined in her subsequent practises.
Compared to her early years working in graphic painting and advertising, Wei-Lun’s involvement in the art market, artwork sales, and negotiations with advertising clients has decreased recently. Due to her fascination with the essence of art creation and her artistic responsibilities, she returned to graduate school to study art. She started art and social practices in the past few years, emphasising education, community, and participatory initiatives.
The Artist Community Serves as an Action Base
Around 2016 to 2017, with the birth of her child and the resulting need for additional space, Wei-Lun emptied her studio at home and applied to move to the “435 Artist Studio” in Banqiao (now “435 Art Zone”) as her new workspace. It is a cultural district affiliated with the Cultural Affairs Department of New Taipei City and managed by private contractors. It offers spaces for cultural workers to apply for residency and hosts regular exhibitions, workshops, and open studios for the public. Wei-Lun recalls her feeling like an “alien arriving on the right planet” when she first came to this place, as she realised through her interactions and dialogues with various artists that “the relationships and dialogues I long for, the state of coexistence, all exist in such an environment.”
She found that when creators engage in conversations and share their creative thoughts and experiences, “each individual’s uniqueness can be preserved,” echoing her daughter’s inspiration about dialogue, originality, and diversity. During those years, this experience further strengthened Wei-Lun’s commitment to her artistic practice within the artist community.
During her years at the 435 Art Zone, as Wei-Lun established her identity and sense of belonging within the community, she also felt the bureaucratic manner of the official venue gradually restricted the artists’ subjectivity and autonomy. However, there was still no critical moment that would prompt the artists to act. To find a space for negotiation and exchange with the public sector and to mobilise the artist community, “education” was seen as the most promising mechanism and communication language at that time. The “Art Petri Dish (A.P.D) Project” was created in 2017 against this backdrop.
Through collaboration within the artist community, the A.P.D Project facilitated domestic and international collaborations between artists, local communities, and educational institutions. Not only did this provide the community with a platform for negotiating with the public sector, but it also utilised education as an action-oriented platform, prompting artist community members to reflect on their own situations and educational experiences.
Where Does the “Dialogue” Come from?
In her art education practice, Wei-Lun recalls her personal experiences and reflects on the current school circumstances of her two children. She believes that education has always brought about a process of nuanced influence and that Taiwan has undergone ideological transformations through education even before the lifting of martial law. It is also the education itself that, according to Wei-Lun, has the potential to foster genuine critical thinking and awareness of the products people ingest or the entire system.
During her high school years, Wei-Lun attended the renowned Fu-Hsin Trade & Arts School, and she describes how she and several of her peers shared an affinity for art and philosophy during her time as a student. However, the vocational education system prevented these students from pursuing further academic endeavours and instead emphasised rigorous technical training. For Wei-Lun, this was not only absurd but also prompted issues such as, “Should art and philosophical thinking be limited to college-eligible individuals and excluded from utilitarian imaginations?” Even when she entered the art university graduate school, she continued to feel perplexed, wondering where the true essence of “dialogue” lies.
With this understanding, we can better grasp Wei-Lun’s intention when she led the artists back to high schools and elementary schools for the A.P.D. project with the goal of “not forming teaching plans with them, but asking questions.” Not only is the act of inquiring an expression of her own ongoing reflections on art education, but it is also an effort to establish a collective consciousness and generate a compelling resonance among the artists. Through constant self-questioning, criticism, and reflection, the A.P.D. project embodies ongoing internal dialogues among the artists and transforms contemporary art into inspiring teaching scenarios.
As an example, the curatorial project “Three Produces Myriad Things: Relational Creativity in Environmental Work,” held at the O-Bank headquarters in 2022, included the workshop “Patsa–– QQ Levitating Agent,” which was curated by Wei-Lun and her team. The workshop began with “At the Surisol Underwater Lab” (2020) by Korean artist Ayoung Kim, and the artists from the project guided children to consider complex issues involving technology, refugees, and natural resources within the sci-fi setting of Kim’s artwork. They attempted to transcend cultural, national, and even temporal boundaries, allowing the children to understand and reimagine the world in a broader context.
While Ayoung Kim’s artworks utilise various techniques and address multiple issues, Wei-Lun highlights the artist’s concerns rather than their technical skill. According to her, the most beautiful aspect is that artists no longer endeavour to pose the same questions as everyone else. To communicate with others, artists can instead approach their concerns differently through their creations. We can witness the incorporation of contemporary art into educational contexts in Wei-Lun’s ongoing practice for precisely this reason. This reflects her ideals about the societal mission of contemporary art and requires in-depth research on artists to comprehend the core values of their creations and employ “translational techniques” to implement them in educational contexts.
However, in my own observation, the significance of such techniques is often undervalued or underestimated. As a result, the educational potential of contemporary art is frequently limited to conventional practices, such as guided tours of art exhibitions or standardised artist talks. Wei-Lun and the A.P.D project’s continuous practises can thus be seen as a pioneering effort to blur the boundaries between contemporary art and education, opening up new frontiers of exploration.
The Infrastructure from Art Education to Culture
At the end of the interview, Wei-Lun, currently working on her thesis, shared the concept of “Cultural Plasticising” based on the ideas of several predecessors. Initiated by Chun-Yi Wang in his article “Exploring the Direction of Cultural Plasticising,” the term “Cultural Plasticising” arose for the first time in the 1970s within Taiwan’s artist community. At that time, the Taiwanese artist community began to consider the effect of Westernised art education on local aesthetics. According to Chun-Yi Wang, art practitioners should revisit this issue and be aware of the racial and social perspectives to reestablish a suitable aesthetic system for themselves. He introduced the term “Cultural Plasticiser” to replace “artist.” The crucial distinction is that the “Cultural Plasticiser” must actively direct the forms of culture, promoting an alternative progression of history and culture.
Wei-Lun, who has multiple responsibilities as an artist, educator, and mother, seeks practical methods to engage in dialogue with her predecessors based on her historical research. Reflecting on her long-term accumulation of creations as an artist, she believes that everything created by artists or cultural workers will eventually impact the local environment. Grounded in this “cyclic consciousness,” she can envision herself as an artist actively moulding the future cultural landscape. Therefore, for her, what may appear to fit under the broad concept of “art education” is actually closer to “cultural replasticising” and the foundational task of “connecting the cycles.”
Yi-Cheng SUN, born in 1990, lives and works in Taipei, Taiwan. She is an independent curator, community contributor and lecturer at NTUH. Her recent interests include cross-disciplinary (Art & Science) collaborative approaches, critical pedagogy and artist-teacher.
This article was published as part of a special issue on The Artist-Teachers in Taiwan.
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