Bio

Julie W. Chang is a San Francisco–based contemporary artist whose work investigates how identities are constructed and how understandings—and misunderstandings—of self and other might be resisted, subverted, and reimagined. Drawing from sources as varied as wallpaper, weaving, genetic mutations, and systems theory, she creates intricately layered patterns that bring differing perspectives into conversation and explore the personal and political forces that shape our lives, including race, class, gender, cultural commodification, inherited narratives, institutions, and social expectations.

Chang’s meditative, craft-based practice transforms traditional patterns through abstraction and unexpected juxtapositions. Removed from conventional narratives and placed in unfamiliar contexts, these recognizable symbols become open to multiple interpretations. They migrate across boundaries and are transformed through encounters with other forms, evoking arrival, foreignness, dislocation, and the struggle to feel at home in one’s own body. Through line, color, and repetition, Chang makes visible hidden histories and the longing, anxiety, alienation, and desire for belonging embedded within them.

In her public works, Chang brings intimate shapes associated with private and domestic spaces into public view, disrupting familiar habits of seeing. Each project responds to the community and architectural conditions of its site and is activated by the changing light and bodies moving through it. Patterns rise up walls, wrap around corners, cross sidewalks, and travel through buildings, offering moments of surprise and delight within everyday life. The formal systems she creates make rules, constraints, and possibilities visible and material, suggesting that the structures through which we understand ourselves and one another are invented—and that what has been made can also be unmade and remade.

Chang received her MFA from Stanford University in 2007 and earned both a BA in Sociology from Tufts University and a BFA in Studio Art from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 1999. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at institutions including the San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, San José Museum of Art, Stanford University, Transformer Gallery in Washington, DC, Montserrat College of Art, Tulane University, Iowa State University, and Yeditepe University in Istanbul. She received the Murphy and Cadogan Contemporary Art Award in 2004 and the Headlands Center for the Arts MFA Studio Award in 2007. She is represented by Hosfelt Gallery in San Francisco and Alisan Fine Arts in Hong Kong and New York.