The Art of Image-Making: On Chang Chun-Yi’s "Yiri's Horse Farm"
"One day, I dreamed I had become a vector man."(1) So begins the artistic statement for Chang Chun-Yi's 2021 solo exhibition, "Yiri's Horse Farm". Echoing the allegory of "Zhuang Zhou Dreams of a Butterfly," this poetic declaration initiates a philosophical inquiry into existence: How does an individual confirm their own being? Did I dream of the vector man, or did the vector man dream of me? How can we be certain that what we believe to be real is not merely an illusion, but the result of perceptual experience?
Starting from a web interface, the exhibition explores the material imagination of digital imagery, constructing a perceptual field with the "vector horse" as its prototype. Through this, it circuitously responds to the profound question of existence. The "vector horse" is created using Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), a common image format on the internet, produced through text-based code and commands. Building on this native "text-to-image" characteristic of digital media, "Yiri's Horse Farm" integrates elements of visual culture such as miniature carousels, Eadweard Muybridge's chronophotography of galloping horses, and the rocking horse toy. It formulates parallel coexisting "online" and "offline" horse farms in both web and physical spaces. The former consists of dynamic vector horses, while the latter extends these prototypes into a series of installations composed of digital symbols, moving images, and objects.
In 1969, Arte Povera artist Jannis Kounellis brought twelve live horses into a gallery in Untitled (12 Horses), challenging the conventions of the art institution through the presence of living animals. In contrast, Chang's work traces the transformation of the "horse" across media—from a digital image, to a web interface, to a range of material forms. It reflects the evolving mindset toward images in the digital age. The image of the horse can be traced back to her 2014 solo exhibition "Instant in-between", where the large-scale video installation Carrousel merged the silhouette of a miniature carousel with footage of 18 carousels located in various squares of Paris. Accompanied by overlapping musical scores, these differently-paced carousels appeared magnificent and colorful at first glance, yet their unoccupied, self-spinning motion rendered the scene quietly desolate.
In her work from this period, Chang often uses games as an entry point. By dissolving the beginning and end of game events, she enables infinite repetition, thereby constructing a sense of time that evokes eternal persistence. This manipulation of time through looping is evident in both her early video works and more recent web-based images. The loop is not merely a temporal structure but a dominant aesthetic condition. For example, in her 2014 video series Fairy's Lake, the artist fragmented perspectives in a hide-and-seek game, dismantled linear narrative progression, and used looping to extend fleeting moments. In this way, scene details—a gentle breeze, fluttering leaves, or light shimmering across the lake's surface—seem to regain texture, even weight, becoming difficult to overlook.
If her early looped videos construct an infinitely extensible "time" through visual accumulation, then the online works in "Yiri's Horse Farm", created seven years later, turn to a different temporality: a constantly generating "present". Also centered on the horse prototype, the five online pieces generated from the web interface emphasize immediacy, randomness, and interactivity. Galloping employs the browser's random generation mechanism, so each time a viewer opens the page, a new and unique race begins—echoing Heraclitus: "No man ever steps into the same river twice." In Standing, each click alters the horses’ behavior, switching among walking, grazing, bowing, and neighing. In Rocking, a colorful rocking horse advances until clicked, when it shifts into a black silhouette, toggling between pixelated color and monochrome vector graphic. Circling appropriates Muybridge's The Horse in Motion (1878), re-animating twelve still frames into a perpetually spinning digital carousel triggered by the viewer's scrolling behavior.
Yet unlike "Instant in-between", which focused on temporality, "Yiri's Horse Farm" also examines how the "web interface" itself becomes a "site-specific" space for art-making. Traditionally, a horse farm is a site for transport and care; here, it parallels the site-specific history of YIRI ARTS, which was once a "Subaru" car repair shop. The use of the online realm as the primary exhibition space continues a curatorial direction from Chang's 2020 curatorial practice "To Martian Anthropologists", conceived during the COVID-19 pandemic: under the limitations of physical space, "how can art continue to happen?"(2) In "Yiri's Horse Farm", vector horses that exist solely within the web browser become the foundation for media experiments that explore the materialization and ontological status of web images, navigating the thresholds between online/offline, virtual/real, digital/material, and visual/tactile realms.
These ideas are further realized in the offline horse farm. Here, vector horses are rendered in various materials, offering tangible perspectives for the gaze. Treating the image’s fragility and mutability as sculptural qualities, Chang extends the image from pure visuality into material presence. Wooden Horse translates the vector prototype of a rocking horse into a volumetric sculpture, giving body to the vector form. Eadweard Muybridge's Horse, based on the online piece Galloping, is reimagined as a large-scale mural, tracing a media genealogy from photography to web image to painting.
Marquee gives these horses a literal track—an L-shaped LED strip that lets them run continuously. Borrowing the Chinese term for a "news ticker" (跑馬燈), the artist constructs a playful literalization: a "running-horse lamp" with horses actually running across it. This piece plays between semantic alignment and functional detachment: it resembles a ticker but transmits no information, satirizing the medium's usual communicative purpose. As the digital image gestures from the screen surface toward its supporting device, the horse—once generated and driven by code—ceases to be a mere visualized text and becomes a reflexive inquiry into the nature of image itself.
Coded Horse goes even deeper into the text-to-image logic of SVG. Featuring eighteen "code/horses" bred on screen, the piece renders both the body and habitat of the vector horse. The text that generates the horse becomes the medium for its own appearance, moving code from the invisible backend of the webpage to its visible frontend. As lines of code scroll horizontally on a white screen, the horse's form gradually emerges: sparse code reveals only fragments, while dense code allows a more complete image to cohere. In this shifting interplay, the horse is both text and image, symbol and figure, revealing the life source and ephemeral presence of digital beings. Sustained by the screen's glow, its full form appears only momentarily—perhaps closer to the true nature of digital life.
"Yiri's Horse Farm" is filled with horses, yet not a single one is biological. From code to image, from screen to physical space, the exhibition constructs a symbolic and material system built around the horse. At its core is not a living animal but a digital entity: the vector horse, a simulated lifeform generated by code and existing solely in the browser window. This is not a horse farm but a simulation of one—a Baudrillardian field of hyperreality. The "horse" here refers to no external referent and aims not to represent reality. Through vectorization and materialization, it continually evolves within a self-referential system of text, symbols, and images, producing a version of the horse uniquely rooted in the digital age.