Chang Yuchen’s Coral Dictionary

Originally from China and based in New York City, artist Chang Yuchen works in an interdisciplinary manner that includes writing as weaving, drawing as translation, teaching as hospitality, commerce as social experiment, and publishing. For the Walker exhibition Ways of Knowing, they present forty-eight drawings from their work Coral Dictionary.

Made up of dozens of drawings, several artist’s books, and a series of performances, Coral Dictionary began in 2019 during a residency on the Malaysian island of Dinawan. Sitting down with the Walker, Chang Yuchen discusses their inspirations and exploration of language.

Walker Art Center

How did Coral Dictionary start?

Chang Yuchen

In 2019, I had the privilege of spending a month on this small island called Dinawan Island located in the state of Sabah, Malaysia, as part of a residency. The island is so small that whichever direction you look, you can see the ocean. My visual landscape was constantly fluctuating and in motion.

I grew up in a really dry place in China, so I’ve never been that close to that kind of landscape before. While swimming in the ocean, I saw living corals. To me, they were kind of intimidating, if not hostile. I got a clear signal that they didn’t want me to be there, and that I was intruding. But, when I returned to the beach where tons and tons of fragments of dead coral bodies lay, I felt an immediate connection to them. This might be because they no longer have their own vitality, so I can project my own ideas onto them, and I felt as if I could understand them.

This led me to start collecting them one by one. After a while, I started arranging them into a certain order according to their shapes. During this time, I also began to learn the about language of Bahasa Melayu, which is a very ancient oral language that never had its own script. From the 13th to the 16th centuries, it was spelled with Arabic, as a result of Islamization, and [after that] with Roman letters, as a result of British colonization.

With this project, I am making a script with coral debris not because Melayu needs one. On the contrary, everyone I met in Sabah was speaking in three or five languages or dialects at the same time, which made me realized actually it is very cool to not have a body, for a language to be a ghost that can hop onto anybody. This loose relationship to me was very novel, coming from Mandarin Chinese, where the sound, shape, and meaning have always been intact. This open and flexible attitude towards language made me feel like I have permission to make my own. That’s how I started Coral Dictionary.

WAC

Can you describe the island site where you sourced the coral?

CY

It is very small and only takes about 10 minutes to walk across it, and maybe an hour to walk around it. As artists in residence, we had this very ambiguous role on the that was in between the local and tourists. The island is beautiful. The sunset and sunrise are always at six sharp. There’s no seasons except for the monsoon season. You gradually lose track of what day of the week it is; it doesn’t mean anything there. There’s a sense of foreverness because every day is the same.

WAC

How did the work first take shape?

CY

I started to draw the corals while I was collecting them, before I knew what I was going to do with them. I felt an intuitive attraction, but that attraction probably has to do with my training.

I went to school in the Central Academy of Fine Arts, which carries on this tradition of socialist realism. Every year we go to a place to 采风 (cai feng, literally translate to “gather the wind”). This is fieldwork for the artist. On these trips we are expected to portray peasants, the proletariat, and their environment. Maybe somewhere in my subconscious I’m still looking for something or someone to portray whenever I travel.

The corals turned out to be a perfect object for the skill I have. The granular texture of coral debris and the granular texture of graphite are a magical match. They’re both so dry, dated, and a form of stone.

For me it is a necessity to draw in order to look at something close enough and for long enough. That is also a form of reading, or a way of knowing.

Later on, I visited a nearby city Kota Kinabalu and stumbled into this bookstore that carried a dictionary, called the Kamus Sari. It was first published in the seventies for the Chinese diaspora in Malaysia. The dictionary is in Mandarin Chinese, Malay, and English; it’s a three-way dictionary. When I opened it, I was immediately moved by the example sentences.

When I learned English, I learned from pedagogical materials made for second language learners The contents are usually dry and emotionally removed. But I don’t think such a repertoire exists for Bahasa Melayu. The sentences in Kamus Sari felt utterly vivid and emotionally charged, like they were directly captured or extracted from real-life scenarios. For example, a lot of the sentences describe nature, the sea, the heat. The sea was a constant in my visual landscape, and the heat indeed dominated my experience during my time at the residency. A lot of the sentences describe war and political struggle, as the 1970s was a very traumatic time in the history of Malaysia.

There are sentences describing spiritual belief, others scar and disease, as well as modernity. For instance, “There are many tall buildings in the downtown area. His head felt dizzy when he left the cinema. Stubbornness obstructs one’s progress.”

I began to understand that language is not some authoritarian paradigm that’s imposed onto the people; language is the accumulation of people’s utterances, the daily conversations, and murmurs. Sometimes they get consolidated into a dictionary and become official.

This language, in Kamus Sari, is very local. It describes the weather of a particular place and the lived experience of a particular community. I try to incorporate that into Coral Dictionary. For instance, when I translate the word wind, I think of the wind on the island, a comfort and a relief in the heat, not the dreadful wind in New York or Beijing.

WAC

What kinds of things appealed to you when you were selecting the sentences to translate?

CY

My first criteria is that the sentences describe something I actually experienced. For example, the sentence, “Fishermen often get caught in the sea by the rain.” I only kayaked twice, and I got caught in the rain once. It was such a strange sensation because you’re enveloped by water in all different forms, and there’s no reference point. I felt happy, lonely, and a little scared.

WAC

Coral Dictionary has also been presented as a book as well as a performance. How did those forms come to be?  

CY

I’m now at the sixth year of this project. Around the second year I realized the danger of me forgetting words that I’ve already translated. Due to that, I started to make a physical dictionary for myself. Initially it was a long accordion because I felt I could always add to it. Accordions have that kind of continuity. After I made the accordion version, I realized it’s too hard to find a page. That led to my making a paperback version to use instead.

I’ve always been fascinated with the book form, and for Coral Dictionary it is a next step that was necessary. I can easily check if a word has been translated or not. It also provides for me a context. For example, when I look for a coral piece to translate the word river, I can look back at the coral for sea. If I translate the word evening, I can look at morning, so that there’s a kind of ecology, so to speak, for new words to be added in.

It is a next step that made sense, but it has more utilitarian purpose, too. I can easily check if a word has been translated or not. But also it provides for me a context. For example, when I translate the word for river, I can look back at the word for sea. If I translate the word morning, I can look at evening, so that there’s a kind of environment, so to speak, for new words to be added in.

WAC

Did the performance develop from the book?

CY

Sometimes I’m convinced that I’m in fact a linguist, and not an artist. Instead of showing the work, I’m more interested in teaching it. The performances or performative lectures to me are almost a disguise to teach. A book looks like knowledge, and it can be acquired by a library. The publication of Coral Dictionary has made my language more “legit”, and it serves as a conduit for me to share this language with others.

WAC

Were there any artists that influenced this work or your approach to it?

CY

I was recently in a group show with [American artist] Christine Sun Kim. When I teach, I also show her work and approach to ASL [American Sign Language], language, and communication. I’ve wanted to learn ASL forever, but I had this fear that learning ASL would influence Coral Dictionary too much. Both languages are based on bodies and gestures. Later realized, that my fear is based on an illusion that a language can be pure.

Coral Dictionary, like all other languages, is impure. It’s deeply influenced by Mandarin Chinese, partially pictographic language that wired my brain, English, a dominant language that I live and work in in the past decades, as well as my exposure to Bahasa Melayu. I began taking ASL classes this year and I found so much affinity. It is delightful. For example, in Coral Dictionary all words related to people (pronouns, kinship words, etc.) are in cylinder shape, while ASL expresses personhood by moving two flat hands downward vertically, as if sculpting a cylinder – that’s just how we humans look like.

WAC

What led to choosing the sentences for Coral Dictionary? For instance: “The surface of the sea waves in the morning.”

CY

That sentence is where I start most of my performances because the sea’s motion is a very important sensation. That motion opened up my linguistic awareness in a way. I grew up in the middle of a big continent, where the ground is solid. Being surrounded by constant motion perhaps helped to destabilize my learned literacy. The word for surface is derived from face, so the coral looks like a face. The sea is horizontal and immersive, and it contains many tides and currents. The next word is alun. If you say a noun twice, it makes it plural. I drew a shadow to mimic the sonic repetition. So alun is wave, alun-alun is waves. In the second line, the first word is morning. Morning is the upper half of the day, and the day is a cycle or a unit. It’s a form of completion.

WAC

I was curious about another example: “The way society changes is evolutionary.”

CY

Society is many members or individuals coming together, becoming associated into this fabric. The change is very dynamic and it has many unpredictable terms. You can tell from the spelling that evolutionary is an imported word from English. Evolution is directional change.

WAC

Is there anything that you hope a viewer of Coral Dictionary would take away from the work?

CY

Another reason I like to perform around Coral Dictionary might be a form of attachment. I am attached to my way of interpreting [corals] or even just being around them. Maybe I should learn to step away from the gallery and let audiences have their own relationship with the language. So, I will refrain from imposing any wishes on how viewers should encounter the language. I do have faith that, before we all learned to speak, no matter what language, we’ve already seen or touched the world. Maybe shape and texture is actually everyone’s mother tongue.▪︎

Experience Coral Dictionary for yourself in the exhibition Ways of Knowing, on view Mar 8–Sep 7, 2025. Learn more and get tickets here.

Want to dive in more? Pick up your own copy of Coral Dictionary here or Dig into the Ways of Knowing exhibition catalog available in the Walker’s Museum Shop here.