Chang Sujung: Alteration
Chang Sujung: Alteration
April 26 - June 14, 2025
Chang Sujung: Alteration
April 26 - June 14, 2025
Laura (the gallery)
1125 E 11th St, Houston, TX
Laura (the gallery) is pleased to present Alteration, a solo exhibition by New York–based artist Chang Sujung, featuring new works that synthesize plein air paintings and the sculptural language of textiles made between the architectural density of Midtown Manhattan and the living, improvisational rhythms of Central Park. Taking its title from a musical term denoting chromatic deviation—and from the tailoring vernacular of adjustment—Alteration reflects on the labor of becoming: of garments modified, chords bent, and identities recut within shifting social and linguistic fabrics.
Born in Korea and trained as a painter before turning to video and sculpture, Chang’s practice interweaves material investigation, etymological curiosity, and quiet acts of resistance. Her sculptures— rendered in fabric and stone—frequently take the form of quotidian garments remade by hand. In recent years, she has focused on sleeves and cuffs: not simply as fragments of dress, but as architectural thresholds where the body enters and exits the world. As Chang notes, “the cuff is where the transformation happens.”
In Alteration, this metaphor is made literal. Stiffened shirt cuffs, embedded with interfacing on both sides, become unlikely supports for landscape paintings executed en plein air—a genre historically reserved for leisure-class artists, here repurposed as a form of remote work. Created across seasons, the watercolor paintings are time-bound documents shaped by weather, stamina, and access to food or restrooms—humble constraints that foreground the body’s ongoing negotiation with space, labor, and care.
The exhibition draws historical parallels to the disposable shirt components of the 19th century: detachable paper collars and cuffs once worn by office workers, clergymen, and waiters to project cleanliness without laundering. These ephemeral garments—fragile in the rain, easily discarded—were symbols of aspirational professionalism, worn by men like Johnny Nolan, the father in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, who send young Francie out with seven cents to buy a paper collar and dicky for his new job. This gesture—small, tender, and class-coded—resonates with Chang’s project of remaking what was once discardable. Her objects are not relics but re-imaginings, “custom-made for each of my ideas,” as she writes. They are sculptures that refuse utility in order to hold meaning. The idiom “off the cuff”—an expression of spontaneous speech, once literalized in the inky scribbles on paper sleeves—becomes here a meditation on improvisation, intimacy, and visibility.
If the sleeve is a vessel, the cuff, in Chang’s sculptural lexicon, is a portal: a place of passage, where one thing becomes another. Drawing from her own lived experience as a non-native English speaker, immigrant, arts worker, and artist, Chang reframes the invisible architectures of adaptation—the re-hemming, the re-wording, the seasonal recalibrations—as acts of authorship. Like the Tree of Heaven in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, her works emerge in overlooked spaces and with improbable tenacity.
Alteration reminds us that transformation is rarely seamless. It puckers and frays, improvises under pressure, and, at its most magical, holds its shape just long enough to be seen.
For inquiries or additional materials, please contact info@laurathegallery.com.
About the artist
Chang Sujung lives and works in New York City. Chang was born in Seoul, South Korea, and moved to the US in 2014. She received her MFA from Hunter College in 2017 and BFA from Ewha Womans University, Seoul, South Korea, in 2013. Her recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Detour: cul-de-sac, International Waters, New York (2022), 88.61 lbs, Hesse Flatow, New York (2020), and Beginningless sky, Endless ground, Jungganjijeom, Seoul (2019). Her work has been shown in several group exhibitions including Marinaro, New York, 56 Henry, New York, A.I.R Gallery, New York, International Objects, New York, Helena Anrather, New York, Yeh Art Gallery, St. Johns University, New York, The Richard and Dolly Maass Gallery, Purchase College, New York, Galerie Christine Mayer, Munich, Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery, New York, Ilmin Museum of Art, Seoul, and others. She has participated in residencies at Carving Studio and Sculpture Center, Vermont (2022), BRIClab: Bridge Space, New York (2021-2022), Hercules Art Studio Program, New York (2018-2021), the Wassaic Artist Residency, New York (2017) and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine (2017). Chang is her last name and Sujung is her first name.
