Information Curatorial Essay Artists Artworks

If My Homeland

Chang Ling solo exhibition

The exhibition is titled If My Homeland. Here, Chang Ling does not treat “homeland” as a fixed place, nor as a purely personal emotional projection. Instead, he sees it as a perceptual experience that is constantly rewritten through the repeated production and circulation of memory, images, technology, collective consciousness, and other forms of information.

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He further introduces the two ideas of déjà vu and prophecy to show how the technologies of our time shape both how we remember the past and how we imagine the future: memory begins to feel familiar yet uncertain, while the future starts to appear as if it has already been written in advance.

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What If My Homeland wants to express is not simply a change in the meaning of nostalgia, but how people living in this era, under the growing influence of algorithms and AI image generation, are pushed to ask again whether their own experiences are still real.

ODRADEK Residence XL・52 rue Paul Emile Janson 1050 Bruxelles

4/16/2026

5/15/2026

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Artist Statement｜Chang Ling

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Pull up your pant legs. Cross the muddy ground.
If my homeland.

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From Flesh City to The Illusion Society, and now to If My Homeland.

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Homeland, in its abstraction, is a shifting coordinate within consciousness. It absorbs emotion, and over time it is continuously fed by images and information. Although it is something I create, it no longer belongs to me alone. It becomes an illusion, shaped and distorted by collective memory.

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Each time collective consciousness looks back, it often appears in the form of déjà vu. In my work, from urban narratives to fragments of social life, the scenes may feel familiar, yet they are charged with uncertainty. What seems private and intimate, as if it were the homeland each of us carries deep inside, is in fact constantly being shaped by other people’s images, data, and narrative structures. At this turning point in a new era, artificial intelligence has begun to take part in the remaking of visual memory, in the filtering of history, and in the writing of what is remembered. I keep asking whether this gradual merging of collective thought is leading us toward a state of passive selflessness, where consciousness slowly loses its own agency.

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Illusion gives rise to both déjà vu and prophecy. It draws awareness toward a “homeland” that does not exist, placing me inside a double illusion, submerged in uncertainty. In If My Homeland, I bring the unreality explored in The Pork Belly Series and The Illusion Society into a more focused reflection on immersion in images, on a consciousness that no longer holds full sovereignty over itself.

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In an age of excess, when consciousness is increasingly blurred and thinned out, can we still recognize traces of what was once vividly alive?
If homeland is an illusion, why do we still love it?

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