The Question of Beings: Yahon Chang, MACRO, Rome, Italy (2016)

The Question of Beings: Yahon Chang built on the artist’s recent The Question of Beings Venice exhibition, with the innovative addition of great lengths of canvas painted with faces and draping from the ceiling to lie on the floor. Originally rendered as a contiguous composition, Chang created the ten- to twenty-meters-long stretches of canvas as a performance, using an outsize brush to render abbreviated and highly expressive visages, as well as the occasional body. On the one hand, the canvases evoked both waterfalls and traditional Chinese literati hanging scroll paintings. On the other, the torrent of faces in combination with the display of the artist’s rusting iron sculptures resonated with the former use of the building as a slaughterhouse, as well as with the sorrow and pain of the twentieth century’s wars and holocausts.
— Britta Erickson