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BLESSINGS ARE THE TAIL OF  AFFLICTION SERIES

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2025
Video, Sound installation, Digital print, Video installation
Site specific

> Exhibition 
2025  The Limit Is The Turbulent Skies, MoNTUE

“Blessings Are the Tail of Affliction” series began with a personal experience: on my birthday one year, I received a cheerful video greeting from a group of performers in Africa. Between the unfamiliar language and their exuberant smiles, the footage stirred an unease in me — prompting questions about the global circulation of emotions. Was this blessing a sincere gift offered to me personally, or a commodified emotion shaped by collective cultural consumption? What forms of unseen labor, technological structure, and cultural asymmetry underpin such affective exchanges?

This experience became the starting point for a larger inquiry into what I call a "misaligned trajectory of blessings" — a path where technological aspiration, emotional resonance, and symbolic exchange converge. Through this series, I examine how emotions and language are distorted, translated, or consumed in the process of crossing borders, revealing the deeper dissonances hidden beneath the surface of smooth circulation.

Located at the entrance stairway of the museum lobby, this work simulates an airport flight schedule, reassembling records of global space debris “launch/re-entry” events from 1960 to 2024 through the vocabulary of aviation — dates, times, destinations, flight numbers, carriers, gates, and arrivals. By framing orbital accidents within a familiar system of legibility, the piece juxtaposes collective visions of exploration with the unforeseen burdens of impact, bringing the distant risks of outer space back into the horizon of everyday life.

Departure—Arrival

Video installation

Dimensions variable, Site-specific

2025

As visitors ascend the staircase, they may catch, in a fleeting turn, faint sounds seeping between the railing and fragments of metal — a fractured melody, mingled languages, and off-key celebratory songs softly reverberating through the space. These sounds, drawn from widely circulated online blessing videos, are embedded in metallic objects resembling space debris. With each touch, vibration, and resonance against the architecture, they shift and disperse, sliding into a dislocated and uncanny space. “Happy Songs in the Air” reflects on the mutation of contemporary blessing economies: when language becomes commodified affective labor, blessings detach from their original meaning, persisting only as worn echoes eroded through repetition, circulation, and outsourcing.

Happy Songs in the Air

Stainless steel, Sound installation

Dimensions variable, 4 pieces in total

2025

Displayed on the newsstand, "The Lunar Edge" assembles fragments drawn from disparate times and cultural contexts: the launch of lunar rockets, the lighting of ritual candles, the fall of space debris, blessing videos filmed in Africa, and mythic tales of cakes offered in lunar sacrifice. Images and texts overlap and collide — news, archaeology, advertising, and mythology unfold side by side — compressing time and space into a single narrative exercise.
This bilingual newspaper is at once a mimicry of everyday media and an experimental device for linguistic and cultural dislocation. It responds to the conditions under which contemporary images circulate and are viewed globally, revealing how experiences from elsewhere are continually received, misread, and recomposed. More than a play of visual culture, it is an inquiry into the structures and power relations that shape the very act of seeing.

The Lunar Edge

Digital print / Newspaper rack

53×77cm, 6 pieces in total / Site-specific

2025

A cake-box-shaped container rests quietly on an airport waiting chair. Inside, a looping projection reveals a rotating cake topped with several human figures—each sourced from performers in viral blessing videos. As the video cycles, their bodies slowly melt and then reconstitute, evoking an endless ritual of sacrifice.
“A Silent Party Loop” has no audience and no true recipient. Here, the gesture of blessing is stripped of emotion, rendered into a shadow of ceremony — one that is watchable, repeatable, and endlessly reproduced. Within this miniature theater of light and cardboard, the viewer watches not only the consumption and regeneration of bodies, but also the contours of their own desire to watch.

A Silent Party Loop

Found objects, Video installation / Airport chair 

Dimensions variable / Site-specific

2025

Beneath the box lies a yellowed pillow, embroidered with the phrase: “dreams departed, body landed.” Like a whispered footnote, it offers a final echo to the entire series — when dreams depart, someone else’s body quietly falls. Through the assemblage of mundane objects and ritual remains, the work slips between the public and the private, sincerity and performance, blessing and depletion—tracing a fragile yet incisive structure of seeing.

  • Ting Chen Chang
  • thingchen.c

Copyright ©2017-2025 TingChenChang 張庭甄

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