Between the Flash of a White or Black Colt — To Run, or Not to Run

Text｜Chia-Min LIU

If a white colt flashes past a crack in time, then this space is where the artist has reached through that opening and drawn the horse’s glowing figure into her own realm.

A Chinese idiom about horses and time speaks of a white colt flashing past a crevice (白駒過隙). Time, in this expression, is as fleeting as the glimpse of a white horse darting through a narrow crack—an image of transience and impermanence, impossible to grasp. Yet, upon entering Chun-Yi Chang’s Yiri’s Horse Farm, one finds that the horses here are, almost without exception, cast in black. Compared to the idiom’s imagery, this track is more like a shadowed mirror. Here, even the briefest moment can be captured by the artist—gently shifted, fixed, and looped without our noticing. In Carousel, ±1, the carousel appears whole but is in fact two halves—each a mirrored segment placed side by side. The silhouetted horses on the left and right rotate in the same direction at seemingly equal speeds. But in the endless loop, they gradually fall out of sync, though the dissonance is subtle. Chang discreetly tweaks their speeds—adding 1% to one side, subtracting 1% from the other—creating a world that remains in motion together even as it slowly slips out of balance. Standing in the midst of this shifting symmetry, I wasn’t sure whether to feel reassured or unsettled. After all, isn’t a carousel comforting precisely because its motion is consistent, predictable, and harmless? But here, in the Yiri’s Horse Farm, even this stability is gently undone. Time, in Chang’s hands, becomes a trick.

“Why are all the horses black?” I asked her, only to realize it was a question as whimsical as one Alice might ask after tumbling down the rabbit hole—slightly absurd, without a definitive answer. Black is a compression of space and depth—it is the absence of depth, and yet also the depth without end. It can be both shadow and substance. Chang transforms this duality into a set of playful rules, moving between two pairs of works: Eadweard Muybridge's Horse and the online piece Circling; and Wooden Horse, a wall installation, and the corresponding online piece Rocking. In the first pair, Eadweard Muybridge’s sequential photographs of a galloping horse (The Horse in Motion) are animated into a carousel (Circling), then flattened back into a two-dimensional wall painting (Eadweard Muybridge's Horse). In the second pair, colorful rocking horses from a toy museum are rendered as flat, black silhouettes in the online piece (Rocking). When clicked, each one rocks gently back and forth. In the gallery, these dark shapes reemerge as three-dimensional wood sculptures. Through these transformations—between color and shadow, digital and physical, two- and three-dimensional—time seems suspended. The horse shadows mutate and frolic across dimensions, both playful and elusive. Circling

The next piece in the exhibition, Marquee, may be my favorite. Here, a single horse endlessly sprints along an L-shaped LED track, formed by a harsh row of tiny lights. Beginning on one wall, it turns the sharp corner and accelerates into the next. The artist explains: “This is the horse that has fallen behind—either by running too fast or too slow. On this track, it charges toward the finish line with increasing speed.” But much is left unsaid. We never know whether it was speed or slowness that caused the horse to be left behind—and does it even matter? We never see a finish line. In fact, we begin to wonder: is there one? All we know is that this single horse runs alone, repeating the same stretch of track over and over. Isn’t this deeply Sisyphean? The horse becomes a quiet echo of the mythic giant who pushes a boulder up a mountain, only for it to tumble down again each day. A cycle without closure. A race without end.

This cyclical temporality reaches a point of stillness in the final piece, Code. Set apart in the exhibition’s only blackened space, it reveals the horses’ original form: strings of colorful code—their bodies digital, their presence conditional. Where there is no code, the horses vanish. When code appears, they stand calmly, flicking tails, grazing gently, as if at rest in a digital stable. Here, we begin to understand the true sleight of hand behind the Yiri’s Horse Farm. If a white colt flashes past a crack in time, then this space is where the artist has reached through that opening and drawn the horse’s glowing figure into her own realm. Daylight remains on the other side. Here, its time has no power. Within this world of her making, Chang stretches time—compressing it, repeating it, shaping and reshaping it. The horses are caught in loops, frozen, transformed, and dematerialized. The entire exhibition becomes a waltz of endless rotation—a rhythm that sometimes falls apart, sometimes holds still, but never ends.

Following the code horses in this final piece, it feels only natural to move from the physical exhibition into the online works—extensions of the same track, this time coded and rendered inside a computer. The online and offline pieces are intricately linked, one to one. For example, the online piece Standing mirrors Code—code-bodied horses whose gestures shift with a tap of your finger. Likewise, Galloping, the online counterpart to Marquee, features a horse galloping across your screen, its speed responding to your clicks. To me, this is the perfect digital parody of a white colt flashing past a crack. No sunlight needed—just a fingertip, and the horse bolts forward. This correspondence brings me back to Carousel, ±1, with its subtly unbalanced symmetry. And yet, the imbalance doesn’t feel unsettling. Perhaps it's like two horses running back to back—or better still, a horse chasing its own reflection, eventually fated to meet.

A racehorse’s sprint does not, and will not, end the race. How much this resembles the act of creation—or life itself. Walking through Yiri’s Horse Farm, a year in the making, I was reminded of Chang’s earlier work, Carousel, as if it were just yesterday: in a dark, circular room, colorful images of empty carousels spun endlessly, riderless. This time, however, each horse seems to have found a posture—no matter how repetitive, no matter how fragile. (As echoed in the titles of the online pieces: Circling, Rocking, Galloping, and Standing.)

I like to think: no matter how the everyday white colt dashes past on the other side, here—on this side—we can turn with the artist, joining her in Circling, rocking, running, or standing still within these imperceptible shifts. Like that horse in Marquee—the one that may have run too fast, or too slow, and thus was left behind—perhaps it doesn’t matter if there’s a finish line. What matters is this: we can, and must, keep running alone along our own tracks (or not).