Listen, listen, listen…
to the metaphysical timbre of the universe.
The silent breath of sound.

It may be that realities exist beyond this one. Others that extend beyond the immediately visible and challenge the knowability of reason. It may be that the sky dances yellow, and somersaults to become the ground. That the infinite bends, and space-time disappears into blue.

In the drawing, the curvature of the world vanishes. The birds and their cloud-like flights vanish. The sun, and with it the angles and photocells of the bodies it illuminates, vanishes. Nothing remains.

The ‘Nothing’?

Sometimes I believe there is an invisible thread that runs through time. Longer than history can account for, spun from a mysterious, unbreakable substance. Perennial and stealthy, that thread traverses everything. It crosses geographies and temporalities. At points impossibly far apart, it forges bonds, revealing a shared sensibility, a universal order. I admire the names attributed to it, while suspecting that none can fully convey its totality.  In Manifesto ainda que tardio (A Manifesto, Albeit Belated), Rubem Valentim said: ‘(…) I try to transform into visual language the enchanted, magical, probably mystical world that continuously flows within me.’ — I suspect this is the thread that crosses decades and an ocean, all the way here.

In a message, Sara Chang Yan tells me it is like ‘an intuition, an idea, a gesture, a feeling, a movement, a phrase, a way of seeing, a direction’ and then the work emerges. Might they come from the same ‘enchanted, magical, probably mystical world’ that flowed continuously within the Brazilian artist? What could bring together two practices so distinct, and so distant in time and space? The line is a visuality created to speak of that which will remain unnamed. For to call it ‘spirituality’ would not encompass the multiplicity of its mysterious manifestations. ‘Faith’ or ‘belief’ would not capture its full complexity either. One must invent ways of subverting the tendency of names to ground imagination in conventional, overly rigid meanings. To strip language of the burden of nomenclature.

Throughout her artistic practice, Sara Chang Yan has devoted herself to an investigation that resonates with these ideas. Through drawing, she has sought to draw out the images from the world. To draw out the symphony from sounds. Like a fortunate obstinacy — the kind found in someone who seeks to dissolve the concrete condition of each element into essential vibration, transcendence, feeling, movement, presence… She seeks an inner life of things and beings, one that matters insofar as it can be felt and shared. One that is not intrinsically bound to philosophical doctrines, yet does not allow itself to be guided by religious prescriptions either. One that is, rather, a mystical inner life, autonomous in relation to any tradition of thought.

It is curious, in this making-as-path, that the artist shows no trace of haste. Nor even any obligation to reach a point of arrival, the absolute limit of discovery. In truth, it seems to be the search itself that drives her. The making that reveals itself as path, and the path that reveals itself as infinite…

In this search, when Sara Chang Yan ‘empties’ a room — as one might ‘empty’ a painting — she seems to make space for a reflection on what remains. When the lights grow dim, the body seems to want to be gently welcomed by the shadowed space. When two luminous centres shimmer on the walls, the drawing insinuates itself through another materiality. When the dark surface of the floor extends vertically, the balance between the poles suggests a certain fragility. Sky and ground rehearse a dance permeated by colours and vibrations. In the atmosphere the artist conjures from seemingly minimal gestures, meditative silence finds refuge in the interstices of a drifting sonic field. There, then, spatiality permeates everything.

Paula Ferreira