Lost In Translation with YS Chang

Since arriving in Canada from Cuba, new media artist YS Chang has flipped the lens of her art on herself, her frustrations, and her experience. Her installation Lost In Translation explores the concept of communication and the experience of navigating a second language. We caught up YS to learn more about the work she will be showing at the Pride In Art event.

Pride In Business: Can you tell me about what inspires the medium that you've chosen to use in your work?

YS Chang: The media is a big part of the work itself, right. And I think that it should always be conceptually related to the main core of the artwork itself. I wouldn't call it performance art for what I do. Because I have a lot of respect for performance artists in general, I will say that what I do is more like a media performance, a different type of work, which involves using video art as a research method to document actions, experiences, and gestures that I use as strategies of meaning.

This is something that comes from my master's thesis paper. It's that idea of playing with the illusion of time that comes from cinema and music. So, building these sort of video installations, site-specific type of environment, it's kind of like that idea of giving to the viewer or the person who interacts with the pieces that dimension of something that happened already. And we just kind of have like a pathologic recreation of it. So, it repeats itself again, and again and again.

And for me, especially when, for my last exhibition the use of projections had a very happy result that I didn't really plan. What came out of that is that idea of creating a person from the space — something that I call “the ghost effect.” That's a resource that I achieved using projections and filming actions, and then reproducing those actions, again, with a projection and then filming that again, and again. And that documentation gives that illusion of something that already happened. And then, when you see it, it's almost like, you know that that happened at some point, but it's not there anymore, and you're just kind of seeing a memory of what's already happened. So that's highly related to the main concept of my work, my research as an artist, which is using experience as a form of art, and most recently, using my experience as a migrant artist.

For me, migration affects a lot of my creative process, on a deep level, especially for having to build meaning in a second language, right? When you create art, you create a lot of necessary structures of meaning, highly related to the language. Obviously, highly related to language, because that's pretty much what conceptual art is. And then when you have to accommodate all that perspective, all the dimensions of your work — for me, it was quite challenging. So, I think that was kind of like an interesting way to bring those issues of dislocation, adaptations, migration, language, translation, all those words into my processes.

PIB: You've touched on the communication aspect of your work through your medium, but within it, you also seem to depict the challenges of communication from a number of different areas. Could you tell me about how those pieces were informed by your personal experience?

YS: So, I think the talk about communication in art, or strategies of communication in art, is something that has been really, since the 60s, highly elaborated, or addressed in multiple ways using written language, or conceptual art itself. For me, going back to this topic, I didn't want to really do it from, let's say, a more common approach. For me the assignment was a new way to give a new dimension to language in itself. It was kind of like this idea of how much you can actually communicate, without any words, without any sound, or more frankly, without any written expression in the work. I think, mostly what I wanted to transmit with those videos — especially because they were all part of a big environment and they weren't meant to happen all at the same time — the idea was to communicate a feeling almost like a mood, and a state of mind, beyond everything else. My whole project for the last few years, my whole work, has been just focusing on that. But it's almost trying to share an experience with the viewer. That challenged me a lot in a way because I don't want people to just like, pull their brains out when they are interacting with the work. "Oh, what is the artist trying to say? What does that actually mean?" You know, I really didn't want to create that confrontation at all.

When I create the work, I want to share an experience and connect with people to that experience. And not really propose a brain challenge with that, but almost like a therapeutic proposal. Almost like a healing process. If you can relate with me through this maybe, with my work, I can offer you some kind of consolation or something like that. So, I think, it's that dimension, I really didn't need to use words or signs or anything. It was just using emotions, expressions, gestures, my own body, my own body language. And I think that was completely a new experience for me. Absolutely. Because that's not quite this type of art I used to do before.

After doing this, I must say I have a lot of respect for performance artists because I understood performance in a completely new dimension. Like how you prepare your body, your mind to perform something, and how you can actually address an amazing level of expression just using your body and just doing a specific type of action.

PIB: There also seems to be this idea that you're not being heard or that you're being silenced echoing through the work. These are echoes of your own experience?

YS: I think, for me, it was that idea of when you have to express in a second language, or you have to express yourself in another culture, it's that frustration you can actually feel when you think people will never understand how smart you are, or how deep and complicated could be your thinking. Just because you don't really have all the skills or all the tools in another language to express them. And that sounds strange. It's mostly intellectual. At some point it becomes really emotionally challenging because it takes you to the point when you actually feel like you're not being yourself, or you're getting lost. That's why the project is called Lost In Translation, right? Because it's almost like when you think your persona as an artist, and you try to translate yourself, and then you have that weird idea of what you're trying to say, but it's not quite it. And I think that's what happens, when, as an immigrant, when you try to do that, I think pretty much it's what is lost in translation.

When you try to translate a poetry book, it will never be the same as how they write it in the original language, right? You have an idea of what the poet tried to explain, but most likely, you just have a translation of that. So, for me, it's pretty much the same with the work of art. As an uninformed viewer, you most likely could probably have a general idea what your understanding, but you don't necessarily have the whole picture with details or high resolution of why that work of art was meant to be created in the first place. That's kind of how I felt.

PIB: You’re originally from Cuba, and now living in Calgary, correct? How has your art evolved from your work in Cuba to arriving in Canada?

YS: I started studying art in Cuba when I was 15 years old. I went to art school first. And then I went to university. I got my major in new media art. And then I came to Calgary to do my masters in new media and technology. It was an interesting process because back at home, most of my work was highly related to traditional critique and questioning. Questioning the position of the artists, the institution, and the art market and stuff like that. We had a lot of performances and live actions and stuff like that. It was that idea of questioning how mechanisms of validation work in the institution itself, and how they affect the artists. But that was because I had a lot of experience related to my artistic context, right? Because I was educated in that artistic composition specifically. And that gave me a lot of resources to analyze it and criticize it, you know, that kind of perspective.

Coming to Canada was a big, big moment of crisis. First of all, I really wasn't really related to the Canadian art institutions, or how it actually works, and I didn't have any conceptual tools to describe, to criticize, or analyze the institution itself. So, for me, it was a point of reflection, like, "What is my art is going to be about here? What am I going to address here?" And then at that point, I think I decided to turn that into myself because I was going through a very complicated process, adaptation, and living in a second language. That cultural change. For me, it was like, "Okay, maybe it's sense to look inside me and try to kind of like, process and understand how all these changes are affecting me and are affecting my own creative process."

So, the work has been evolving. It's still documenting experiences to address more general topics, but it's kind of become kind of like retrospective. I just think how all my all my circumstances affect my creative process itself, and how my present self has become a reflection of all those experiences, and how I've been dealing with them. I have given completely new dimension to my work in terms of personal expression that I really never did before. My work was quite neutral, and generic in that idea. Now it has become way more personal. More focused on conflict and frustrations that I have personally.

I think, in the end, the art has become almost like a therapeutical process of healing. The main work here is like defining my own identity. So I have started to use my work to define my identity, as a woman, as an artist, as a migrant, as a human being. And it's been interesting because it has given me new resources to explore and understand creation and a completely different approach. Less political, more personal. And now, I could say, I have achieved a point when it looks way more like a personal statement. And I think it has helped me a lot to understand that when you focus things from within, you can actually reflect way more bigger issues, but from a more personal approach. And that's also related to those conflicts related to migrant experience, right? Because migration is a big deal right now around the whole world. And we can almost say that contemporary society is almost a kind of diaspora in some way. So that person, the link between cultures, between languages, that it's trying to reinvent themselves from a completely new scenario. I think that that's pretty much an interesting perspective: to analyze huge problems like displacement, racism, and a lot of interesting things that are happening in society right now to analyze from that perspective.

PIB: Absolutely, it's a very sort of prominent experience for a number of folks right now. On that note, your work expresses a great deal of intersectionality with your identity as a woman, as a migrant, and as an artist. In sharing this work, have you encountered other artists who have encountered that intellectual frustration you're expressing?

YS: Yeah, actually, last year, I was part of an exhibition organized by SpanicArts in Calgary. It was called Now and Then: Tales of Immigration and Resiliency. And it was like an umbrella that gathered together a bunch of artists that are living in diaspora. Latin American, living in diaspora, and how they confront those issues of, you know, migration and resettlement from the artwork itself. And it was quite interesting because there were multiple media. There was animation, photography, paintings, very interesting installations.

But the interesting part was to see how each artist makes it their own, based on their own experiences. So, it was quite interesting to approach a community of people who kind of share the same emotions or the same stories, but each person has a different background, a different context. And it's further translated in their own personal tale. And that's quite interesting, because you can see that you're not alone. But you can also see the uniqueness of your story, right?

PIB: Absolutely. The personal experience still rings true for everyone. Would you be able to tell me a little bit about what attendees of the event could expect from your presentation of Lost In Translation?

YS: It's a compilation of multiple video performances. They were created for the main installation itself. So those are multiple actions and gestures that I document in my artist's studio. They talk a lot about interesting ideas and dimensions related to that frustration that you can get to feel when you think you're not being heard. Obviously, that relates to my own frustration, writing my thesis paper, or trying to address a specific idea not quite developing well in English and then feeling like people didn't understand what exactly was my point in my arguments at the university, with my professors, trying to say something they could not quite understand. But this new context is not really addressing that only. I'm just trying to present a body of work that represents that frustration for not being heard.

And I think that's a situation that right now, a lot of people can relate to in multiple scenarios in contemporary society. I think that frustration of you've been yelling and yelling and yelling, and no one is actually listening. It's something that touches other dimensions like mental health or social issues or political matters.

What I really like about my artwork, or like my creative process is I never actually start a work of art from zero, I just reuse and keep reusing the images that I already produced and I try to re-elaborate them in a new context. And that gives me that idea, again, that I keep defending, that the work is not about anything, and it's about everything at the same time. Because it can give you dimensions that if you're building images that are beyond concepts, they can be resuscitated and re-presented and used to create completely new strategies of meaning again, and again, and again, and again, in pieces of content. I think that's quite interesting. So, if there's no bias in the work, just keep addressing things that people can relate to and appropriate within their own.

I think the artist should control the artwork until a certain point. And then there is a point where the artwork should exist by itself. And it should breed and interact with others in their own mechanism of expression, The people have the choice to interact with the work, based on their experience, take whatever questions they want. And then if after that you actually got impressed, you actually want to like, find out more about what is the work, then you can go and read about the artists or whatever the intentions are.