Sara Chang Yan na Brotéria

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DATE

30 Jun 2025

AUTHOR

Tomás Camillis

Sara Chang Yan na Brotéria

AUTHOR

Tomás Camillis

In Sara Chang Yan's "Uma serenidade em êxtase", celestial mechanics are swept away by subjective enchantment. Her works reveal a cosmos thrown into vertigo that perhaps stems from the instability of our innermost – the ecstasy of contemplating a universe indifferent to our pleas disrupts what was once structure.

The machine of the world opened up

To those who were already shying away from breaking through it

And just the thought of it made him grimace.

[…]

A whole reality that transcends

His image sketched

On the face of mystery, in the abysses.

Carlos Drummond de Andrade^[1]

The influence of the stars on the Western artistic temperament was not insignificant. On clay tablets, the Babylonians had already systematized their enchantment with the cyclical precision of the constellations, hoping to find cosmic redemption for our insurmountable loneliness. The geometry of such impeccable patterns guided the principles of classical art, which preferred the intellectual understanding of natural structures to the individual expressions of the eccentric artist, available to all through the clarity of the human cogito. But perhaps our essence is not the logical articulations of a pure reason, but rather the fleetingness of an indecipherable mystery. The anguish that threw us to the stars would not be solved by its analysis, because what interested us there was the enigma of the vastness and the insurmountable distance, this quality of everything that transcends the control of the intellect to touch the hidden core of who we are. Perhaps the consistency of our actions does not stem from rational precepts but from the tenacity of elusive desires that propel us into inner and outer realms beyond.

We're divided between the classical and romantic temperaments. The understanding of facts and the ambiguity of affections are measured on a never-balanced scale that guides the spirit of all eras, artists, and works. To remain in the territory of the possible, in an enriched insecurity that is never impoverished in preferences, art needs to converge these two contradictory states in what can be called poetic life. Because both affections and facts are always filtered by a subject who is unable to escape from his own experience.

In Sara Chang Yan's Uma serenidade em êxtase, celestial mechanics are swept away by subjective enchantment. Her works reveal a cosmos thrown into vertigo that perhaps stems from the instability of our innermost – the ecstasy of contemplating a universe indifferent to our pleas disrupts what was once structure. In A qualitative plan, both the invincible speed of the cosmos and the gestural indecision of the subject transform the celestial bodies into luminous diagonals, broken spots, open lines, bouncing curves, sporadic cut-outs, lacunary residues, broken silhouettes, and lost planets. All its supposed solidity is subjected to an empty pictorial center that resigns everything to the edges, accentuating the anguish of a nature that only aims to escape from itself.

In the caves of Lascaux, Picasso came to understand drawing as the economy of precise gestures that quickly grasp the essence of something. The draughtsman's line follows a spontaneous path that is different from the logic of painting, which fills in spaces to cultivate solidity. Perhaps Chang Yan undertakes such dynamism not to capture the stellar plot but rather to accentuate the elusive nature of a cosmos in flight: her drawings are like the traces of energy that build and deform a real in eternal incompleteness, making it impossible for us to delimit its nature – that is perhaps why the artist accumulates layers in her works, reinforcing them in the transparency and curvature of the suspended papers, in the gestural tears and in the overlapping of graphics to suggest the plasticity of a delicate palimpsest. Even so, it's difficult to pinpoint the exact intensity of her movements because her works also have a tone of pain and slowness that contradicts the speed of the drawing to suggest the natural wear and tear of a cosmic plot that has already been exhausted. Their supports, which levitate on weak wires, reaffirm the suspension of the meaning of this imprecise cosmos, suffocated in its lightness. Their curvature also oscillates them in the air currents of the exhibition room, in an attenuated version of the gales that sweep across their pictorial landscapes – between the stubborn indolence and the speed, it places our elusive reading of things.

Also, fluid is the ocean that opens the video art Sintonizar uma alegria serena, an original landscape present in countless cosmogonies, given its promising elusiveness. The curvature of the support accentuates its mobility, just as its depth is highlighted by the holes through which light rays are projected into the back of the room, three delicate lines suggesting immensity. In the foreground, a rock moves, reticent – its movements seek to overcome the exile to which its density has imposed it, so different from the liquid vastness. Or would its solidity be precisely the anchor of this ocean that, pure power, wants to be outlined through its gestures? Also, paradoxical is the very image of a stone that floats, when carried by the waters forgetting its attributes – everything oscillates in a universe that is still indistinct, and order is only imposed by human ingenuity: the bells toll and the succession of flags exhibits a geometric logic of clear delimitations and chromatic purity, like flags that cut out the identity of nations.

This dialectic is also explored in Estar sem nome, where a play of reflections is used to project, in the center of the work, an irregular and ghostly geometric shape, solid and silent, that is nevertheless the secondary silhouette of a polished iron rod whose qualities are its opposites. And just like the stone that floats and the gale that oscillates, spectral geometry also creates a cosmos that is torn between construction and destruction where the center never holds – it is precisely the gap that is at the heart of this anxious cosmos that is always on its way to becoming something and yet flirting with nothingness. Its yearning for concreteness does not overcome the allure of apathy. In Sintonizar uma alegria serena, it's only when the bells toll that we see the perfectly delimited bands of color: cohesion starts too late. The beginning and the end meet at the same moment, because delimiting is both beginning and ending, reaching maximum power at the most precarious moment and challenging our intellectual understanding of the facts.

If Beauty is the feeling of belonging to an understood reality, such paradoxes are more suited to the Sublime temperament, which promotes the displeasure of the fragile human in the face of an unfathomable universe. But in Chang Yan, the anguish is serene and the ecstasy relapses. The innocent style with which she portrays cosmic hostility tinges the usual terror with a delightful acceptance, a childish complacency that is perhaps the most resounding victory.

Uma serenidade em êxtase, by Sara Chang Yan, is on show until July 9, at Brotéria. The artist received an honourable mention in the 15th edition of the EDP Foundation New Artists Award 2024, the results of which were announced last week.

^[1] Drummond de Andrade, Carlos. (1974) A Máquina do Mundo In. Reunião, Rio de Janeiro: José Olimpo Editora, p. 197

BIOGRAPHY

Tomas Camillis is an author and researcher based in Lisbon, working on fiction and on essays in the interplay between art, philosophy and literature. He has a master's degree in Art Theory by PUC-RJ. In recent years he has participated in researches, taught courses in cultural institutes, helped organize conferences and published in specialized magazines. He currently collaborates with the MAC/CCB Educational Service and Umbigo magazine.

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