Text by Wang Yu
 
 
A Sweet Fairytale?
 
Softness and sweetness—these are the initial impressions that Chang En-Tzu’s Snow White series brings to spectator’s mind. This feeling arises from her choice of materials, colors, and the central symbol of the series: Snow White. The pieces are crafted from soft materials like fabric and embroidery threads in warm tones like pink and pale yellow. At first glance, the figure of Snow White evokes the familiar, sweet innocence of Disney characters.
 
However, upon close inspection, this “sweet fairytale” turns out to be a stereotype imposed on Snow White. Chang’s portrayal of it often stands in stark contrast with this sweet stereotype in terms of its expression and mood. Works like How Brave! - 2 (2007) and What Is “They Live Happily Ever After”? (2009) feature long, loose threads that disrupt the visual purity, while dark, densely stitched threads flow from Snow White’s eyes. This adds a touch of sadness or decay to her beautiful, smiling face, creating a complex and contradictory state that challenges the notion of sweetness.

While still a student exploring her artistic path, Chang En-Tzu’s works already hinted at a style that fused soft materials with sweet themes. In the interview, she discussed her Snow White series, where she juxtaposes sweetness with contrasting elements. Pointing to an image of Snow White in her portfolio, she reflected on her past creative struggles: “It felt like my work no longer reflected what I truly wanted to express. The world isn’t filled with only beautiful things, so I asked myself, ‘What is the happiest image?’ Snow White came to my mind first, but she was crying, breaking the hopeful image I’d carried since childhood.” She also spoke about an earlier piece that laid the groundwork for this theme, Surprised Explosion! (2006–2008). “I had a constant urge to create something explosive, yet beautiful from a distance.” Bringing this concept to life took nearly two years and resulted in an installation that, from afar, resembles blooming flowers but, upon closer inspection, reveals shattered high heels—a striking juxtaposition of beauty and destruction.
 
Beyond the complex and contradictory expressions of Snow White—the central symbol—Chang masterfully weaves strong narratives through her supporting characters and elements.  In How Brave! (2007), organic forms born of unconscious thought and self-pleasuring female figures explore themes of female identity and desire. Our Relationship (2008) features wild animals symbolizing primal instincts and an overturned pumpkin carriage, subverting traditional storylines and challenging the limitations often imposed on women’s futures. The Hidden Power - 4 (2013) reveals the weapons concealed beneath skirts. Perfect Imperfection - 2 (2013) portrays a body with prosthetics, revealing that women can be both soft yet strong, powerful and determined, embodying a deep sense of spiritual perfection. Under the soft and sweet appearance, Chang can weave together both joy and sadness, beauty and decay. Through this juxtaposition, she adds multilayered dimensions to her portrayal of female figures in fairy tales, allowing viewers to glimpse reality through her imaginative lens.

Easily Overlooked Dangers
 
Since her university days, Chang has experimented with embroidery and fabric as medium in her art, describing embroidery as a way to “stitch together the gap between imagination and reality.” Reflecting on her childhood experience of injury, she shared, “I was about four years old and vividly remember feeling the adhesive tape covering my wound every day. Even after the wound healed, the memory remained strong in my body. Instead of resisting stitches, I saw them as something that saved me. Stitching is strong and direct but also represents repair and healing.” She also explained that embroidery pierces the fabric, creating small holes, with each stitch both repairing and damaging it.
 
Reflecting on the meaning of embroidery in Chang En-Tzu’s Snow White series, I initially associated it with the idea of “女紅 (nü hong),” meaning the sewing and embroidery work of women. However, after hearing her perspective, I realized that it represents something entirely different—a powerful, visceral bodily experience. Rather than simply connecting to femininity or craft, it embodies a relationship where destruction and healing coexist.
 
Around 2013, as her Snow White series evolved, Chang began incorporating social issues into her work. For instance, Perfect Imperfection - 2 (2013) was inspired by the story of a female athlete who has used prosthetic legs since childhood. “I didn’t want to be confined to a single series. So much is happening in life and in the world around me, and many of these things inspire me to create.”  Profoundly moved by the events in her personal life and society, she felt increasingly compelled to explore new themes beyond a single body of work. Later, she was selected by the Ministry of Culture as an artist in residence at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, where she spent six months from mid-2015 to early 2016.
 
Living in a historic foreign city filled with museums, galleries, and performance spaces offered Chang a fresh perspective on life and shifted her artistic focus in notable ways. She recounted two pivotal experiences:  first, her time in Paris, a city rich in history, where exhibits showed how deeply Europeans value and understand their past. Even a single object, such as a weapon, is displayed to tell a clear story of its historical development. That year, the Centre Pompidou held a retrospective of the German artist Anselm Kiefer (1945– ), which explored themes of German history and WWII memory. This exhibition sparked a question for her: “What is the history of my own country? I wanted to uncover the history of the place where I grew up.” The second experience was a terrorist attack near her residence in Paris. Though she was fortunately not present at the scene, the event left her an everlasting impression. The daily environment may seemingly look safe, but it has hidden dangers that could appear at any moment.
 
Therefore, she broadened the symbols and forms in her work to better express her thoughts and feelings. For the final exhibition of her residency, she used the image of a little girl as a symbol of innocence. Unlike her previous use of tangible imagery for narrative, she approached the materials in a more abstract way—using felted wool, wax, and ready-made placemats stitched with images of guns to evoke a more spiritual inquiry.

Concern for Society, Care for History
 
At the end of 2017, Chang held a solo exhibition at Crane Gallery titled Big Brother is Watching You, a slogan from George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Many elements of the work in this exhibition draws on archival materials from her reading of Taiwan’s White Terror era—a period of political repression from the late 1940s to the late 1980s, during which many were imprisoned or punished for suspected dissent. The atmosphere of her work reveals a sense of being insecure, a sense that starkly contrasts with Chang’s usual sweetness. This body of work represents nearly two years of her accomplishment of her return to Taiwan from Paris.
 
The exhibition is divided into three series: Little Girls, The Last Words, and The Wall. While her signature sweet color palette remains, her approach to composition has evolved. Rather than using embroidered outlines to guide the narrative, she incorporates various materials—collages, knots on the back of embroidery, and wool embedded in fabric textures—to tell the story. Many of the visual elements reflect her experiences in Paris. For instance, in Little Girls - 2 (2016), the scene features girls at play, barbed wire, corpses, and soldiers, with some girls’ faces obscured by embroidery, felt, and colored pencil. These concealed faces are inspired by protesters who demonstrated against the mysterious death of Chen Wen-Chen, a scholar mysteriously murdered during the White Terror era. During these protests, participants wore paper bag masks to avoid being identified from Taiwan’s authoritarian regime. In The Wall - 5, Chang juxtaposes vibrant ribbons, bows, tropical plants, and birds with the outline of a “two-one gesture” inspired by a children’s connect-the-dots book. This gesture symbolizes Article 2, Paragraph 1 of Taiwan’s Martial Law, under which numerous intellectuals faced execution. Historical records show that some made this gesture as a final act of protest before their deaths.
 
Although the elements in Big Brother is Watching You largely draw from specific literary texts and historical events, Chang does not appear solely focused on authoritarianism and surveillance. Instead, through the tears and pain of history, she highlights the hidden, ambiguous, and often overlooked dangers, unease, and fears that linger within the seemingly comfortable, everyday environment of modern society.

Crafting a New Narrative Through the Juxtaposition of Personal Symbols
 
Since 2018, Chang En-Tzu has integrated her past spontaneous doodles, symbolic characters, and classic phrases from stories into her work, embracing a freer, more abstract style. Using strong materials like embroidery, wool felt, dyed fabric, and soft sculptures, she creates a richer visual experience and shapes a unique artistic language. Through her work, she reflects on contemporary social issues such as Deepfake crimes, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the war in Ukraine. However, she doesn’t explicitly reference these events; instead, she conveys an ineffable overall feeling that includes negative emotions but also hints at resilience and collective strength.
 
In her Survivor series (2018), Chang uses her childhood photos from family albums. The texture of the canvas, the color of the threads, and the knots on the reverse side of the embroidery evoke feelings of helplessness, pain, and memory by juxtaposing images of children with elements of violence. Do You Still Recall - 1 (2018) carefully employs abstract elements to express duality. Knotted threads and vivid embroidery suggest scars, scabs, bullet holes, or flowers, leaving room for diverse interpretations.

The Hidden Power - 5, 6, 7 (2020) and The War Imprint (2021) reframe the imagery of helpless, wounded children from the Survivor series. Through composition, linework, material choices, and the addition of hopeful elements like candles and stars, these works create entirely new narratives. The Our Allies series further builds on the Snow White series, reinterpreting and juxtaposing symbols to present scenes that blur the line between imagination and reality, connecting fairy tales with contemporary society. Together, these two series draw on elements and symbols from different phases of Chang’s work, suggesting that, while individuals may be vulnerable and fragile, they can find refuge, form alliances, and stand together to face unknown dangers in their environment.
 
Since 2020, Chang has become increasingly skilled at utilizing exhibition spaces, allowing her works to interact, regroup, and form new relationships and narratives. In her 2020 exhibition The Hidden Power at PLUS ONE space in Beyond Gallery, she reinterpreted individual paintings from her Snow White series, transforming them into soft sculptures that extend their original meanings. Fragmented animal bones in the exhibit are inspired by the story of a “wolf-woman” who collects scattered bones across the desert, piecing them back together. As she sings, the bones gain flesh, grow fur, and come to life as a wolf, running toward the horizon and, in the light, appearing as a laughing, liberated woman. Supported by the symbolism of the wolf-woman and the soft sculptures, the Snow White figure, representing femininity, breaks free from the stereotypical constraints of her upbringing, reclaiming lost or forgotten strengths and achieving a fuller, more resilient life force. The soft sculpture Sugar House (2021) presents soft, column-like candies stacked within the exhibition space. Serving as its backdrop is a large triptych, Do You Still Recall - 5 (2020), the candies in Sugar House become bullets. This contrast and metaphor foster a dialogue between the works, subtly hinting at an underlying danger or conflict.

An Ever-Evolving Artistic Language
 
The work Behind the Softness (2021), acquired by the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts in 2023, presents a spatial installation composed of soft sculptures. Sharp, fabric-sewn spikes emerge from the ground, while two gun-shaped objects, also made of fabric, hang above. Upon closer inspection, these gun-like forms reveal themselves to be crafted from coat fabric, while the triggers are made from the soft, furry hands of plush toys. In this piece, the protective, comforting nature of coats and the softness of plush toys are transformed into a stark and conflicting representation that resembles firearms.
 
At the end of our interview, when asked about her core artistic vision and motivation to keep creating, Chang shared: “Fairy tales, history, and the play of materials are the layered elements of my work. Through art, I explore and interpret the coexistence of beauty and violence, contradiction and conflict in our world.” She added with a smile, “translating the feelings in my mind into tangible creations requires endless experimentation with materials to bring my vision to life. Creation can be a process with stress, but it, for me, is like the secreting of dopamine.” Beginning with her exploration of sweet fairy tale princesses that examines the tension between femininity and social constraints, she later employs rather diverse materials and images to reflect Taiwanese history and society. Chang En-Tzu embodies the ever-evolving, inquisitive spirit of an artist. Her work reflects a continuous journey of reflection, exploration, and growth, through which she finds both fulfillment and strength.