Solo Exhibitions (Brief)

Chang has held various solo exhibitions including 《21feet》 (LDK, Seoul, 2024), 《Glove box》 (Alterside, Seoul, 2024), 《???? climb, fronthook, angel, invert, daphne, figure head, scorpion, fall, gemini, princess, chopstick》 (Shower, Seoul, 2023), and 《Surge analysis》 (Gallery175, Seoul, 2021).

Group Exhibitions (Brief)

Chang has also participated in numerous group exhibitions and performances, including 《DOOSAN Art Lab Exhibition 2025》 (DOOSAN Gallery, Seoul, 2025), 《off-site 2: Eleven Episodes》 (Kukje Gallery, Seoul, 2025), the 25th Seoul Intl. ALT Cinema & Media Art Festival (Hongdae KT&G Sangsangmadang Cinema/Suite, Sangsangmadang Gallery, Seoul, 2025), and 《Into the Rhythm: From Score to Contact Zone》 (ARKO Art Center, Seoul, 2024).

Originality & Identity

Chang Younghae’s practice begins with an exploration of the body — its entanglement with technology, social regulations, and the boundaries of perception. Her early performances used pole dance and pair skating as mediating languages to examine how the norms of sexuality determine bodily behavior.

I want to die because I want to touch aono / I want to hold aono so badly I could die(2021) and the solo exhibition 《???? climb, fronthook, angel, invert, daphne, figure head, scorpion, fall, gemini, princess, chopstick》(Shower, 2023) best exemplify this inquiry. Within a role-playing structure, the artist studies the moment when the body oscillates between passivity and agency — and the subtle dissonance that arises as language and image attempt to interpret bodily motion in real time.

Her later works expand these concerns toward the issues of gaze and control.

The performance Black Maria(2023) reconstructs the relation between the social rules of pornography and optical devices, questioning how the camera objectifies the human body. This “surveillant gaze” develops into medical control in the solo exhibition 《Glove box》(Alterside, 2024), which addresses the ethical tension between the body placed under clinical instruments and its reproduced image.

In the films Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation / 1S34008AP, F010122011964, .04. 0*8. 5mm and Ray(2024), shown at the NeMaf Film Festival, the artist exposes the anesthetized body at the threshold between life and death — its numb sensations and the cold mechanism that visualizes them.

This exploration continues in the solo exhibition 《21feet》(LDK, 2024) and the performance 3(2024), which critically question physical distance and the social regulation of safety. Drawing from the “21-foot rule” used in American policing, these works symbolize uncertain boundaries among space, time, and perception, depicting the human sensorium as a field perpetually twisted between reality and fiction.

Most recently, in the group exhibition 《Doosan Art Lab Exhibition 2025》(Doosan Gallery, 2025), her works annie, cobalt and blur, blur(2025) extend these investigations into technological and political dimensions. Here, Chang analyzes how violence and desire seep into everyday life through AI and media environments, observing the gradual numbing of human perception under contemporary conditions.

Style & Contents

Chang Younghae’s work conducts a “material experiment of the body” through diverse media — video, performance, installation, and film. Her early performances translate bodily movements into language, reading, broadcasting, or music, transforming repetition, exhaustion, and interpretive failure into staged dramas.

In 《???? climb, fronthook, angel, invert, daphne, figure head, scorpion, fall, gemini, princess, chopstick》, the performer’s actions are simultaneously narrated in text, creating a live disjunction between words and gestures; audiences experience this dissonance physically.

It visually demonstrates what the artist describes as “the different physicality the body acquires when passing through image or text.”

She later turned to the mechanical apparatuses that mediate bodily imagery — the camera, X-ray, and medical equipment. In 《Glove box》, these devices are re-positioned not as recording tools but as structures of control. Videos and objects in the space interweave perspectives of dissection, resuscitation, and observation, constructing a sensation in which the body can no longer remain a part of “me.” Particularly in Ray, desire is overlaid with X-ray images, dissolving the boundary between inside and outside, life and the inanimate.

In 3 and 《21feet》, the artist manipulates spatiotemporal perception to produce sensory confusion. Artificial lighting that recreates daylight within nighttime, or time-delayed cues such as scent, compose an “uncertain temporality” where reality and fiction overlap.

This approach converts the structural violence of reality into invisible sensory domains — light, smell, and distance.

In her 2025 works annie, cobalt and blur, blur from the Doosan Art Center exhibition, Chang heightens the density of her visual language, using AI-based visual grammar to expose how “average perfection” distorts human emotion.
Through this, she points to the violence inherent in technological represenations of the body itself.

Topography & Continuity

Among the younger generation of Korean artists, Chang Younghae has most consistently expanded the body as a site of technological image and sensory experience. Her practice redefines the “position of the body” while traversing the social contexts of sexuality, medicine, surveillance, war, and AI.

The medical gaze in 《Glove box》, the spatial regulation in 《21feet》, and the technological distortion in 《Doosan Art Lab Exhibition 2025》 all form a continuous series of experiments into how the body relates to the world.

This attitude has established a rare perspective in contemporary Korean art — one that understands the body as a media event rather than a biological entity. Chang’s body exists as a site where language, technology, and institutional systems intersect and reassemble.

Her use of non-human viewpoints — CPR cameras, X-rays, or AI imagery — reveals that perception beyond the human is perhaps the most accurate means of representing today’s body.

Grounded in a critical gaze toward social violence, desire, and technological mediation, Chang Younghae’s practice persistently raises the question: “How can the body, as a site, be rewritten?” Her future works are expected to expand this inquiry onto a global stage, situating her as an artist who continues to navigate the fragile intersections of the physical, the technological, and the ethical in contemporary life.