"My work utilizes photographic depiction while also extending from it by relying on modes of duration, materiality, and process with photography. This occurs because I believe that photography is excellent at describing and reflecting the world in the images that it produces of the world. However, I believe that something beyond photographic representation can reflect the world in a more accurate way."
Chang is interested in using forms of production and materiality that allow his photographic work to function only in the context of contemporary art. Chang's interest is in eschewing the plurality that is specific to photography in order to occupy a plurality specific to art itself, namely art's ability to function as decor, as an object of discussion, as an artifact, and as a commodity.
Phil Chang (b. 1974, Elkhart, IN) received his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. Recent solo exhibitions include The Suburban, Milwaukee, WI and Cache, Active at LA><ART. Recent institutional group shows include Light Play: Experiments in Photography, 1970 to the Present at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Keeper of the Hearth: Picturing Roland Barthes’ Unseen Photograph, Houston Center for Photography, Houston; A Matter of Memory: Photography as Object in the Digital Age at the George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY; About Time at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Unfixed: The Fugitive Image at the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Transformer Station, OH. Chang’s work has been written about in ARTFORUM, The New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, Aperture, Blind Spot, IMA Magazine and C-Photo. Other published texts include those with Charlotte Cotton, James Welling and Walter Benn Michaels, and an artist’s book Four Over One, published by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Curatorial projects have included Soft Target at M+B, Affective Turns? at Pepin Moore and Seeing Sight at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. His work is in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the California Museum of Photography, UCR ARTS. Phil Chang lives and works in Los Angeles.