The Generated Interface: Reading the Artistic Grammar of Chang Chun-Yi Through YIRI Horse Farm

Perhaps many people have experienced a similar realization: the more complex an idea is, and the more delicate a sensation becomes, the more it ought to be carried by simple forms. Compared with complexity, simplicity often evokes deeper empathy and imagination in others. In my view, Chang Chun-Yi has long approached both her artistic practice and curatorial work with this conviction. What especially interests and impresses me is how she—through a set of distinctive methods (and instincts)—constructs a particular two-sided relationship between creation and curation, allowing the two to reflect and reinforce each other.

In recent years, Chang’s curatorial projects have received notable attention. From Air Plants—Performance Ability within Contemporary Arts (2017) and Daily+—Greater Taipei Biennial of Contemporary Art (2018) at the Yo-Chang Art Museum, to To Martian Anthropologists in 2020, she transformed the uncertainties brought by the pandemic into an active strategy, pioneering an “online-first, offline-supplementary” format. The physical exhibition unfolded at the New Taipei City Arts Center, while a meticulously designed virtual exhibition existed in parallel. Here, the online space was not a mere expedient surrogate for the physical one, nor simply a digital record that extends the exhibition’s life. Rather, it revealed “another side” of the artworks. Across these dual formats, many works opened interactive channels between virtual and physical realms. As Chang herself notes, the two modes share “no master-slave relationship, but complement each other.”

YIRI Horse Farm (2021–2022) embodies a spirit of “self-curation” and extends the online–offline dual structure initiated in To Martian Anthropologists. The exhibition employs strikingly simple elements: the “horse” is nearly the sole visual thread; colors are reduced almost entirely to black and white; and no elaborate sensory forms intervene. Beyond aligning with Chang’s minimalist aesthetic, this simplicity corresponds to what she seeks to explore. In my view, YIRI Horse Farm is a highly distilled formal experiment. Using the “horse” as a medium, Chang examines how digital technologies, entangled with the history of media art, generate multi-layered interfaces that reshape the viewer’s perceptual experience.

In 1879, British photography pioneer Eadweard Muybridge invented the zoopraxiscope, projecting a sequence of still photographs of a galloping horse as a moving image. This moment marked a significant point at the intersection of scientific and media histories. While YIRI Horse Farm is far more than a mere homage, this foundational event in the history of moving images provides a key to understanding Chang’s exploration—an entryway into the genealogy of the “horse” in the digital age.

The exhibition consists of several groups of works distributed across physical and online dimensions. The first grouping includes the online looping projection Carrousel #2 and the onsite video installation Carrousel, ±1. In the latter, the left and right halves of the image differ subtly by approximately ±10% in speed—an almost imperceptible discrepancy that produces a faint sense of strangeness. In contrast, Spinning and Muybridge’s Horse reverse this relationship: they appear as online motion paired with onsite stillness. The endlessly rotating carousel on the webpage collapses momentarily into a thin straight line when the “silhouette” moves toward the edges, puncturing the illusion of a physical projection.

This dynamic/static tension extends to the following works. Wooden Horse appears onsite as a static wooden silhouette on the wall, while its online counterpart—a colored wooden horse—moves from right to left like a luminous trotting-horse lantern. Yet when touched by a viewer, via mouse or touchscreen, the horse instantly transforms into a black SVG silhouette and “comes alive,” rocking back and forth like a real toy horse. With minimal feedback mechanisms and refined visual economy, Chang investigates how digital technologies open multi-layered modes of perceiving and contacting images.

In the final two groupings, the onsite LED installation Marquee corresponds to a herd of SVG horses running across a screen; and the video installation Code corresponds to its online version, where the “horses” manifest directly as lines of programmable code. The code runs—yet whether the horse itself is truly moving or still becomes increasingly ambiguous.

Muybridge decomposed the horse’s motion into sequential images and then recombined them through technical means to make them “move” in a new media configuration. Similarly, Chang disassembles and recomposes elements throughout this series, using contemporary media and web technologies to derive new relational structures. Unlike pixel-based digital images, SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics)—constructed through paths and parameters—scale indefinitely without distortion, a product of the web-based era. In YIRI Horse Farm, Chang not only employs SVG as the foundational unit of image construction but—in works such as Code—exposes its parameters directly, revealing what usually remains hidden behind the image.

These rational and sensorial threads weave together to form the distilled appearance of YIRI Horse Farm. Its online and offline components each hold their own incompleteness; their symbiotic yet distinct relationship generates a new “interface.” This recalls Chang’s early video series Fairy Lake (2014), in which she stitched together images and sounds divided by lake surfaces or tree trunks—scenes clearly displaced in time and space yet intimately connected. Visitors navigating between the dual spaces of YIRI Horse Farm and To Martian Anthropologists resemble the little girl in a red dress in Fairy Lake, crossing invisible thresholds and experiencing interwoven, multi-modal content. If we consider the habitual imagination of “online exhibitions,” they are typically supplements, virtual showrooms, interactive spaces, or digital avatars to physical exhibitions. Audiences often expect completeness from the physical venue. Yet Chang disrupts this logic: to fully experience the exhibition, one must traverse multiple interfaces.

YIRI Horse Farm thus provides an illuminating entry point into Chang’s creative and curatorial thinking. This is also evident in how individual works relate to one another and to the whole: each piece feels extended from the friction or collision of others. This symbiotic structure—independent yet continuous, multifaceted yet interconnected—echoes Chang’s curatorial strategies. In her 2003 curatorial debut Work-Medium, she invited artists to sequentially “inhabit” an exhibition space, each building upon the previous artist’s work until the last participant erased the exhibition by destroying the accumulated piece, completing the cycle through a temporal return to zero.

In subsequent group exhibitions, Chang often develops curatorial structures by letting one work lead to the next, following a generative logic reminiscent of “one begets two; two begets three; three begets the myriad things.” Works carry relational threads yet maintain distinct agency within the whole. YIRI Horse Farm clearly demonstrates this logic within her solo practice: vector images animate within browser windows, transform into carousels, or reassemble into sequences of running horses. The silhouette of a physical horse fractures into multiple digital horses, which then recombine into new formations.

Thus, in Chang’s curatorial projects, one senses a consistency akin to artistic creation; and in her solo exhibitions, one discerns complex expansions of a shared conceptual thread. YIRI Horse Farm exemplifies this. So does her work This Is Very Simple So I Can Do It (2019), in which several Taiwanese conceptual artists verbally describe another artist’s work in a single sentence, concluding, “This is very simple; I can do it too.” Layers of intertextuality emerge through this relational mirroring. Notably, many of these artists also appeared in To Martian Anthropologists, where Chang intentionally blurred the line between curating and creating, making the two simultaneously identical and not identical.

For Chang Chun-Yi, both creation and curation concern acts of organizing and seeing—choosing symbols and transforming them into systems of perception and experience. From the outset, she has never treated these as separate pursuits. This stance loosens certain conventions of contemporary art mechanisms and perhaps approaches something fundamental to art itself. When form is reduced to a kind of purity, complex perceptions become legible on the generated interface, and art is experienced through its essential logic of connection.