Luyao Chang
The Passion, 2022
Pigment mixed with silicon, steel chains, nails
26" x 26" x 4"
Dream of the Butterfly, 2025
Copper metal, sterling silver metal, glazed stoneware, high temperature wire, acrylic, steel chain
Maze: 12" x 32" x 32"
Butterflies: approx ea 5" x 4 3/4" x 4 3/4"
Lulu Luyao Chang (b. 1996, Hyogo, Japan) is a multidisciplinary artist based between Chicago and New York, working across installation, sculpture, ceramics, and video. Born in Japan and raised in China, her transnational upbringing shapes a practice rooted in navigating contradictions, between freedom and restriction, playfulness and unease, memory and erasure.
Chang grew up in a world presented as a utopia but experienced as a dystopia. This tension drives her work, which examines how invisible forces, political, social, and cultural, shaping both personal and collective realities. Drawing from firsthand encounters with censorship, ideological conditioning, and the silencing of conversations around gender, labor, and agency, she creates environments that expose the soft violence embedded in everyday structures.
Her installations often adopt the aesthetics of childhood: mechanical toys, bead mazes, swings, and colorful, sugar-coated forms. She is particularly drawn to the mechanics of toys because they embody the illusion of control, objects that appear playful yet operate within predetermined limits. By combining hand-built ceramics with found materials, she constructs precarious systems that reveal fragility beneath rigidity. These works invite viewers in with familiarity and nostalgia, only to destabilize their sense of agency and uncover the unsettling truths beneath.
Working in an in-between, non-binary space, Chang uses world-building to imagine alternative realities, ones that challenge dominant narratives while acknowledging the complexities of existing between identities, ideologies, and truths. Her practice is a continual attempt to expose what is hidden, distorted, or left unsaid, transforming art into both a site of resistance and a space for reimagining new possibilities.
Chang is a 2025 Inclusion Fellow with Chicago Sculpture International and a 2022 ArtTable Fellow. She has been a featured panelist for The State of LGBTQ in China hosted by The China Project, and her 2024 solo exhibition at the Chinese American Arts Council | Gallery 456 in New York was reviewed in IMPULSE Magazine. Her work has been exhibited at IRL Gallery, Latitude Gallery, Art Fair | Detroit, Zero Art Fair, and more, with writing published in World Art and GUERNICA. She holds an MFA from the School of Visual Arts and a BA from the Central Academy of Fine Arts.
- Luyao Chang