PLATO

We are excited to announce the opening of Henry Hung Chang's solo exhibition, Island and Its Visitors, next Friday, October 10, from 6 to 8 PM at our lower gallery. Henry Hung Chang spent his childhood in a Daoist temple in Taiwan, founded by his grandparents. The temple’s environment, in which religious practice, ritual, myth, and folk beliefs were woven into daily life, continues to shape Chang’s visual language. Through richly layered imagery and ritual iconography, he invites viewers into a world where orientation dissolves and the sacred merges with the quotidian. 

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The exhibition is titled after a six-paneled series, Island and Its Visitors, embracing a non-narrative approach to storytelling. Each panel collapses linear time and invites multiple orientations, existing both as independent works and as part of a greater whole. The earth and the sky form part of a continuous cycle, incense smoke drifts across shifting scenes, ribbons of water flow between worlds, and religious objects from the artist’s youth — decorated handheld fans, cylindrical umbrellas, and adjustable candelabras — transform into symbols of cosmic forces. Seasonal motifs, such as golden chrysanthemums celebrating autumn’s harvest and the lotus representing summer’s vitality and transcendence, root the work in cycles of renewal. 

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Reassessing his upbringing during the rise of national identity in the island country of Taiwan, Chang is drawn to the notion of the island as a multilayered metaphor for a space where personal, societal, and natural harmony can be achieved. His characters are attuned with their peaceful surroundings and are aided by benign spirits in charge of flora and fauna. Elsewhere in the show, the muscular youths appear on funerary shrines, circular medallions or as floating human islands in their own right in an elliptical flow between night and day, life and death, body and soul. According to Chang, he "began this body of work with the concept of cosmic forces that are at once oppositional and complementary."

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Using a mix of gesso and watercolor with varying degrees of transparency, Chang creates a luminous and airy atmosphere, which reinforces the paradisiacal nature of island life. His soft and delicate paint application — with a myriad of nuances and sometimes coupled with the use of paper cutout collage — emphasizes the fragility of the island's interconnected ecosystem. Archetypal and local symbols and shapes, such as the yin and yang, the octagon, the circle and the star appear throughout the show, both as specific cultural references and to underscore the shared nature of humanity. Thus, Chang's island can be seen as an escapist dream, a societal model, and a symbol for fragile and interdependent human existence.

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Henry Hung Chang (b. 1989, Taipei, Taiwan) is a visual artist based in Brooklyn, NY. He received his Bachelor’s Degree in Industrial Design from National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan, and he studied Illustration at the School of Visual Arts, New York, NY. Chang's recent exhibitions include: The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition, the Brooklyn Museum (2024-2025), New York, NY; Blood as Thick as Water, PLATO, New York, NY (2025); Drawing Room at Vardan Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2024); 26th Annual Postcards From the Edge, Berry Campbell Gallery, New York NY (2024); PLATFORM x GAYLETTER: The Pride Curation, Platform, New York, NY (2024); Spaces Out (two-person show), YUI Gallery, New York, NY (2019); group exhibitions, Leslie-Lohman Museum Project Space, New York, NY (2019, 2018), and Envisioning Ourselves as Creator, the University of Illinois, Chicago, IL (2023, 2022), among others. Chang has won a New York Foundation for the Arts Grant (2025) and an AI-AP American Illustration award (2019).

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