Exhibition: Shanghai Chang Unveils New Work at Art for Kep, 18–19 July

As his one-month residency at Knai Bang Chatt draws to a close, textile designer, filmmaker and Homeless Artists Collective co-founder Shanghai Chang will present the results of his stay at Art for Kep on 18–19 July: sculptural busts in dyed textile, rising from voluminous woven skirts, that carry his recurring questions of identity, hybridity and transformation into three dimensions for the first time.

One of the sculptures on the lawn in front of the residency building at Knai Bang Chatt, where Shanghai Chang has lived and worked for the past month. — Art for Kep

Since 20 June, the Art for Kep residency has hosted Shanghai Chang — Phnom Penh-based artist, filmmaker and co-founder of the Homeless Artists Collective — in the renovated staff quarters of Knai Bang Chatt. As the four-week stay nears its end, the atelier is preparing to show what it produced: a series of standing figures built from stiffened, dyed textile, each with an elongated head and neck in a single saturated colour rising out of an enormous, ruffled skirt in woven metallic-grey fabric. It is the first time Chang has pushed his textile practice fully into sculpture, and the first time his work has been staged directly against the sea that defines Kep.

Before the fabric, the frame: Shanghai Chang builds up one of the sculptures' steel-wire armatures in the atelier. — Art for Kep

From Garment to Sculpture

The pieces read at once as fashion and as figure. The bodice and elongated, almost bird-like head-and-neck are wrapped in coarse teal fabric, seams left visibly raw and fraying; below the waist, the silhouette explodes into a skirt built from dozens of folded, ruffled panels of a shimmering pinstriped mesh, a form that recalls both a ballgown and a full-blown flower. Chang has spoken of his textile work as reaching back to 17th-century European fashion silhouettes and to a childhood ambition — to become a ballerina — that ran against the grain of a modest Cambodian upbringing and its fixed gender roles. That friction, between inherited form and personal transgression, is legible in the sculptures' construction: classical couture proportions built out of humble, workaday material, stitched and stapled by hand rather than draped by a professional atelier.

Shanghai Chang adjusts one of the sculptures inside the Knai Bang Chatt atelier-gallery, ahead of the residency's closing show. — Art for Kep

An Artist Rooted in Experimentation

Chang trained formally as a textile designer, graduating in Fashion Design and Photography from Limkokwing University of Creative Technology, before a 2017 meeting with curator Roger Nelson pulled him toward experimental film. His 2018 debut short, Mélancolie (n.), screened in the "Cambodia in Shorts" selection at the Cambodia International Film Festival and travelled internationally through the S-Express programme at SeaShorts. A second film, Prey Sar, followed in 2019, screening at the Phnom Penh International Film Festival and later at the Institut français du Cambodge. Alongside cinema, his practice has ranged across conceptual fashion, photography, video and installation — with the busts now taking shape at Knai Bang Chatt marking the fullest development yet of the sculptural strand of that work.

The Homeless Artists Collective

In Phnom Penh, Chang is one third of the Homeless Artists Collective, formed in 2018 with Many Sin and Sosoth "Kwan" Sovankong after a year spent living and working together in a shared creative space. The group's name traces back to a chance conversation with a noodle-shop owner following a talk at Kon Len Khnhom, the community arts space founded by Meta Moeng. For their second show, 180°, at Mirage Contemporary Art Space in Siem Reap, the three artists set their disciplines side by side — Chang's textiles, Sovankong's paintings, Sin's steel sculpture and screen prints — around what draws them together beyond friendship: a shared position at the front of a new generation of Cambodian contemporary artists.

Kep as Mirror

Art for Kep is structured around three strands — art, music, and marine conservation — chaired by Jef Moons and guided by a steering group that includes Satcha, the Cambodia International Film Festival, Kep Music City and Marine Conservation Cambodia. Residents work from a studio on the Knai Bang Chatt grounds, in a town whose modernist villas, part of the New Khmer Architecture movement, were emptied under the Khmer Rouge and largely left in ruins — a layered, unresolved landscape that recent residents such as photographer Walter Koditek, painter Karona Hoeuy and multidisciplinary artist Kanha Hul have each engaged with in different registers. For an artist whose work already circles questions of identity, displacement and hybridity, Kep's mix of colonial memory, royal past and slow renewal offers exactly the kind of charged ground his practice looks for.

One of Shanghai Chang's textile busts overlooking the sea at Kep. — Art for Kep

Exhibition Details

Dates: 18 – 19 July

Venue: The Wave @ Kep West, Kep City

Meet the Artist: 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM (both days)

The closing presentation of Shanghai Chang's residency brings the sculptures out of the atelier and into The Wave, Kep West's dedicated exhibition space a short walk from Knai Bang Chatt, where the public is invited to meet the artist and discover the work in person before it travels on.