Art Metropole

#16921

Gillian's House

Artist

Yan Wen Chang

Price

$1000.00

Date

2026

Publisher

Art Metropole

Format

Multiples

Genre

Painting, Sculpture, Art Metropole Edition

Description

On the occasion of Art Basel 2026, we are pleased to announce the launch of a new commissioned fundraising edition by artist Yan Wen Chang, titled Gillian’s House. Produced in an edition of five, each multiple is individually hand-painted and contains subtle variations.

Gillian’s House extends Chang’s ongoing investigation into diasporic subject formation, and the psychic structures through which belonging is negotiated under conditions of displacement. Having immigrated alone from Malaysia to Toronto at seventeen, Chang’s practice emerges from a sustained engagement with the promises and contradictions embedded within migration: the aspiration toward stability and self-determination alongside the realities of precarity and inequality. Painting functions as the primary material site through which she stages these conditions to examine how identity is produced through fragmentation and reconstruction.

This new artist’s multiple takes the form of an archetypal North American house rendered in cardboard, a material associated with impermanence. While the house occupies a powerful position within the cultural imaginary of migration, symbolizing security and ownership, its construction from cardboard destabilizes these associations. The house becomes less a monument to permanence than a provisional structure, held together by aspiration and memory.

Inside Gillian’s House unfolds a hand-painted scene featuring “Gillian” and “Jillian”, the artist’s recurring cartoon doppelgängers. Throughout Chang’s practice, the twin figures of “Gillian” and “Jillian” function as unstable forms of self-portraiture that resist singular identity. Operating as psychological projections, they allow Chang to externalize competing dimensions of selfhood and examine the ways in which identity is continually performed, negotiated, and revised.

Within the house, a vague and unresolved narrative unfolds between the two doppelgängers. The scene carries forward the same psychological tension and instability that animate Chang’s ongoing Gillian paintings.

Gillian’s House, 2026
Yan Wen Chang
gunpowder, gouache, and sumi ink on cardboard
14 × 11 × 15cm, in custom 19.5 × 19.5 × 20cm box
Edition of 5

Yan Wen Chang (b. 1993) received her MFA from the University of Guelph in 2022, and her BFA in from the Ontario College of Art and Design University in 2015. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Gillian, Galerie Nicolas Robert, Montreal (2026); Gillian, Susan Hobbs Gallery (2025), Toronto; Jillian, Hawkins Headquarters, Atlanta (2025); Nympho, A.D. NYC, New York (2024); Auto Dealer Dream, Weatherproof, Chicago (2024); Odile’s Notorious Magnum Opus Of Thirty-Two Fouettés, Susan Hobbs Gallery, Toronto (2023); and Four Hollywood Paintings, X in Residence, Toronto (2022). Recent group exhibitions include Matthew Brown Gallery, Los Angeles (2026); Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery (2025); and the Visual Arts Centre of Clarington (2025). Both her solo exhibition Nympho, at A.D. NYC, New York (2024); and her two-person exhibition Auto Dealer Dream at Weatherproof, Chicago (2024) earned her features as ‘Must See’ exhibitions in Artforum. Her 33 ft. public billboard entitled same problem my father had and what he dreamed was on display at Hamilton Artists’ Inc. from 2022 to 2023. Chang is represented by Susan Hobbs Gallery, Toronto.

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