13 April 2026

Artist Highlight - Kai Hsuan Chang (London Craft Week 2026)

Interview and Review

Kai-Hsuan Chang is a Paiwan Indigenous artist from Taiwan, currently based in London and completing an MA Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London. Working across sculpture, installation, moving image, and performance, his practice explores material boundaries and Indigenous memory. Through handcrafted processes, he re-tribalizes transformed landscapes, examining how energy infrastructures reshape land and memory. His work has been exhibited across international independent and institutional platforms, and continues to develop through research-led and process-based experimentation.

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ARTIST INTERVIEW

1. SOLAR- translates large-scale solar panel infrastructures into handcrafted forms. What drew you to reinterpret these industrial structures at a human scale?

Because I work away from home, I rarely return. On one visit, I found the entire landscape had changed—it was shocking and difficult to accept. For my family, the loss of a familiar environment was deeply unsettling. This experience led me to transform these cold solar infrastructures into forms that reconnect with objects and landscapes we once recognised and lived with.

2. The work uses wood, rope, and dye rather than technological materials. How do these handcrafted materials reshape the meaning of energy infrastructure?

Rather than reassigning meaning to infrastructure, I see this work as an act of reactivating cultural memory and asserting presence. By constructing the piece entirely with traditional handcrafted materials, I intentionally distance it from technological function. In doing so, the solar form is stripped of its utility and re-situated as a site where memory, material, and cultural identity can re-emerge.

3. The installation reflects on landscapes altered by solar panel fields in your homeland. How do these forms carry personal and cultural memory?

This land once held many traces of Indigenous life—from my grandmother to my mother, our community was deeply rooted there. Ceremonies such as weddings, where we danced in traditional dress, remain among my most vivid memories. Through the work, I seek to layer these embodied memories onto the surface of solar structures, allowing personal and cultural histories to reappear and coexist with imposed forms.

4. Through handcrafted processes, you aim to “re-tribalize” transformed landscapes. What does this idea mean within the context of this work?

“Re-tribalization” reflects a reversal of historical positioning. Indigenous peoples in Taiwan have long been shaped by successive colonialisms, absorbing external cultures through religion, rituals, and everyday life. Rather than remaining in a passive position, I ask: what if we become the agents who redefine these structures? Through this work, re-tribalization becomes a way to shift from marginality to agency—reclaiming the right to interpret, transform, and inhabit the landscape on our own terms.

5. Within The Invisible Made Visible , the work reveals hidden relationships between infrastructure, land, and identity. What aspects of these relationships do you hope viewers reflect on when encountering SOLAR-?

On one level, the work continues and affirms Indigenous cultural presence. At the same time, while renewable energy is increasingly seen as necessary and progressive, I want to question what remains unseen behind it—what is displaced or lost. The work also reflects an emotional response to the sudden transformation of one’s homeland, capturing the disorientation and complexity of witnessing a familiar landscape radically altered.

LAND, MEMORY, AND THE AFTERIMAGE OF INFRASTRUCTURE

Review by Chih-Yang Chen, Art Director

Kai-Hsuan Chang’s work comes from a very direct encounter with change. SOLAR- is not an abstract reflection on infrastructure, it begins from a specific moment, returning home and finding the landscape altered beyond recognition. That sense of disorientation stays present throughout the work. It doesn’t try to resolve it. The forms take reference from solar panel fields, but they are rebuilt through wood, rope, and dye. This shift is important. The work moves away from the language of technology and into something slower, more tactile. You can see the labour in it, the repetition, the hand. The structures feel closer to something lived than something engineered. They carry a different kind of weight, not physical but emotional. At the same time, the work doesn’t simply reject the infrastructure it references. There’s a tension in how it sits. Solar energy is often framed as progress, something necessary, and even positive. But here, that narrative is unsettled. What comes forward instead is what disappears in the process. The loss is not dramatic, it’s quiet. Familiar land, everyday routes, places tied to memory. Things that are difficult to measure but deeply felt. Memory runs through the work in a layered way. It is not presented as a clear image of the past, but something that overlaps with the present. References to family, ceremony, and community sit alongside these altered structures. They don’t replace them, and they don’t fully merge either. The work holds both at once. That tension gives it its complexity. The idea of “re-tribalisation” is also important, but it doesn’t come across as a fixed statement. It feels more like a question being worked through. What does it mean to respond, rather than simply absorb? The use of handcrafted materials becomes part of that response. It repositions the work, not as a representation of infrastructure, but as a way of re-entering it from a different perspective. There’s also something about scale. By bringing these large systems down to a human level, the work changes how they are experienced. They become something you can stand near, move around, and relate to physically. This shift makes the distance between body and landscape more apparent. SOLAR- doesn’t offer a clear conclusion. It stays with the complexity of the situation. Progress and loss, presence and displacement, memory and change all remain in tension. The work doesn’t try to simplify that. It just makes it visible and lets it sit there.