Chang Yuchen
bernbah - to change - 改变, 2026

Pastel on paper

8 1/4 x 11 3/4 inches (29.7 x 21 cm)

Courtesy of the artist

Selected by Rosario Güiraldes 

Since 2019, I’ve been composing a written language with coral fragments. It began during a residency on an island in Malaysia, where I felt an immediate, inexplicable connection to coral debris that covered the beaches—as if I could understand them. 

This experience coincided with my encounter with Kamus Sari, a Malay– Chinese–English dictionary first published in 1973. The example sentences included are beautiful and specific. They are sediments of lived experience. The two sediments—one natural, one social—became connected through a process I call translation. Ancient as an oral language, Malay never had its own script; instead, it adapted to various alphabets over time, from Arabic to Roman. Humbled by this linguistic mutability and resilience, I began to imagine a feral literacy. Through reading corals pictographically, metaphorically, and emotively, I translate the expressiveness of nature into what we call meaning. I assign a horizontal coral to mean “sleep,” a hollow one “hungry,” and draw shadows to indicate plurality. Over the past six years, I have translated 98 sentences from Kamus Sari into coral bodies through detailed pencil drawing.

Like any written language, Coral Dictionary also circulates through printing and publishing. In 2022, Coral Dictionary Vol. 1, 2019-2022 was published, which includes 216 corals translated during the project’s first three years. The book was produced in two editions: a paperback and an accordion edition, whose blue tone and undulating structure echo its oceanic origins.

Through performative lectures and participatory events, I’m interested in opening this once-private project into a meeting place and a form of experimental pedagogy.