Tang Chang Embraces the Unified Mind

The Pali Buddhist word ekaggata (unified mind) refers to a meditative state that can be achieved by overcoming obstacles. It is also the ethos that Sino-Thai artist and poet Tang Chang brought to his canvases, as curator Orianna Cacchione noted in an essay accompanying his 2018 solo show at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art. Since his inclusion in the Tenth Shanghai Biennale in 2014, more than two decades after his death, the formerly obscure figure has steadily grown in renown. Now, a solo presentation of more than 100 of his gestural, black and white ink paintings has overtaken two floors at Bangkok Kunsthalle. The show’s title, ‘Calligraphic Abstraction’, pays homage to Chang’s legacy as one of Thailand’s first abstract painters – he worked in a nonrepresentational mode as early as 1958 – and singles out his calligraphic style, which riffs on traditional Chinese ink-brush painting as it blurs the boundaries between image and text.

Chang was born to an ethnically Chinese family in Bangkok in 1934, four years before Plaek Phibulsongkram came to power as Thailand’s third prime minister. Phibulsongkram’s authoritarian administration – which staged a coup in 1947 and remained in power until 1973 – used military dictates and cultural mandates to violently suppress the heritage of ethnic minorities and diasporic communities in service of ultranationalism. The ekaggata that characterizes Chang’s work takes on a new valence considering the political instability and assimilation pressures that the artist experienced for decades. In many ways, he held ‘outsider’ status throughout his life; he received neither formal art schooling nor anointment as a national artist by the culture industry and, though he exhibited with galleries in Bangkok during the 1960s and ’70s, in his later years he opted instead to show work out of a small museum he opened at his home.

This idiosyncratic spirit is on display in ‘Calligraphic Abstraction’, which focuses on Chang’s artistic output in the two years preceding the popular uprising of 14 October 1973, which led to the end of the military dictatorship. (The violence of the period so affected Chang that he did not paint for several years, instead turning his attention to poetry.) All of the paintings on view are untitled. In one work from 1971, quick gestures suggest a flight of swallows that lose their individual forms as they congregate; in another from the same year, the characters are more distinct, like neat rows of dancers; a 1972 example sees thick lashes of ink take up the bulk of the page. The range of Chang’s strokes offers a dynamic counterpoint to the calligraphic art associated with the Chinese literati: an elite class of scholars-bureaucrats whose paintings paired serene landscapes, often sprawling across the bottom of the page, with columns of text. The Bangkok Kunsthalle’s status as a former textbook publishing house provides an apt backdrop to the challenges that Chang posed to such calligraphic traditions, which were historically associated with imperial patronage.

Upstairs, museumgoers encounter a live restoration of two of Chang’s paintings from c. 1960–65, which is being executed in collaboration with conservationist group Restaurateurs Sans Frontières. This unusual curatorial choice muddies topological relations; in the space of a single show, viewers encounter work that has aged naturally and the effort to restore it to how it may have looked originally. The massive abstractions, positioned against scaffolding, depict thick, Herculean strokes of ink in varied textures. Here, Chang’s reach verges on incomprehensible. To view such arduous, grand work being restored is almost Buddhist in nature: it invites meditation on history, gesture and impermanence.

Tang Chang, ‘Calligraphic Abstraction’ is on view at Bangkok Kunsthalle until 13 July

^{Main image: Tang Chang, ‘Calligraphic Abstraction’, 2025, exhibition view. Courtesy: Bangkok Kunsthalle; photograph: Puttisin Choojesroom}