With “Hear the Wind Sing,” Fran Chang’s first solo exhibition in France at Bremond Capela, the São Paulo-based artist offers a deeply intimate and metaphysical exploration of belonging, transformation, and perception. Working on silk with quiet precision and a reverence for both material and memory, Chang conjures landscapes not as places to be mapped, but as sites of resonance where time, space, and identity drift in and out of view like the wind from which the exhibition borrows its name.
A Practice Based in Cultural Complexity
Fran Chang, “Hear the Wind Sing,” photo by Nicolas Brasseur, courtesy of the artist and Bremond Capela.
Born in Brazil to a Taiwanese immigrant mother, Chang’s practice is rooted in cultural displacement, the instability of memory, and the perpetual negotiation of fragility and beauty. Her paintings on silk a medium passed down matrilineally, and tied to both Chinese painting traditions and familial ritual become vessels for unspoken histories. Each gesture is irrevocable. Each stroke, absorbed into the porous weave of the fabric, is final. Like breath caught in a hush or a cloud dissolving at dusk, her landscapes are ephemeral yet precise, sparse yet weighty with significance.
At the heart of “Hear the Wind Sing” is an anecdote: a friend recalling how her grandfather would sit by the window, listening to the wind each evening. This poetic image of listening to that which is invisible but present becomes both metaphor and methodology in Chang’s work. The wind, for her, is not just weather but a force of memory and transformation, of displacement and renewal. Her images, often marked only by hints of stone, glacier, or sky, refuse narrative in favor of sensation. They unfold slowly, as life itself does, without the imposition of clear beginnings or ends.
Painting in Dialogue with the Political and Personal
Fran Chang, “Hear the Wind Sing,” photo by Nicolas Brasseur, courtesy of the artist and Bremond Capela.
This is painting as atmosphere, an attempt not to describe the world but to feel one’s way through it. In this regard, Chang’s practice finds kinship with the shan shui tradition of Chinese ink painting, where mountains and rivers are less geographic than emotional constructs. Yet her work is not nostalgic; it is in quiet dialogue with political, personal, and planetary scales. In her series “Zenith” from which the exhibition takes part of its conceptual spine, Chang delves into astrophysics and cosmology to contemplate perspective, the horizon, and our emotional smallness in relation to the universe. The zenith, that imagined upward vector from the human body into the cosmic expanse, becomes for her a metaphor for interiority, a way to look not just up, but within.
Chang’s Work and Her Mother’s Calligraphy
Fran Chang, Mat à l’étouffée, 2025, courtesy of the artist and Bremond Capela.
What appears, at first glance, as meditative or minimalist landscapes reveal themselves as acts of assertion, diasporic, and linguistic. Behind her compositions, often hidden from view, Chang stamps her name in Taiwanese sinograms using her mother’s calligraphy. These are not ornamental marks, but declarations: of presence, of lineage, of language reclaimed. In resisting the flattening stereotypes of sinophobic and exoticizing representation, she reclaims her identity from the margins, embedding it into the very support of her work. The gesture speaks volumes: a name is not just a signifier, it is structure; not just surface, but foundation.
Fran Chang, “Hear the Wind Sing,” photo by Nicolas Brasseur, courtesy of the artist and Bremond Capela.
“Hear the Wind Sing” is an exhibition that rewards slowness, stillness, and close looking. It speaks in whispers, in silences, in in-between spaces that hold both personal ache and collective resistance. In a cultural climate eager for spectacle and immediacy, Fran Chang invites us to linger in solitude, in uncertainty, in suspended dreams. We come away not with answers, but with echoes: of wind through silk, of memory through skin, of a horizon seen with closed eyes.
About Fran Chang
Fran Chang, courtesy of the artist and Bremond Capela.
“Fran Chang (1990, Poços de Caldas, Brazil) builds landscapes through painting in which the atmospheric expanse of the horizon contrasts with the dimensions of the canvas. The artist’s works are inspired by inhospitable places, devoid of human figures and vegetation, and depict ethereal and lunar scenarios where steam, water, and ice predominate. The choice of silk as a surface for pictorial creation—a medium that dialogues with her Taiwanese ancestry—reinforces the diaphanous character of her works and reveals the underlying structure, thus establishing a dialogue with the tradition of painting. Chang’s work speaks about the contemporary experience of a relationship with nature mediated by digital images, the intangibility of the natural world, and the ambiguous potential of silence and solitude by depicting scenes of a dissipating world. Fran Chang has a Bachelor’s degree in Visual Arts. She also has an academic extension in Astrophysics and Astronautics from the Federal University of Santa Catarina. In 2024, she held Zenith, a solo show at Milan. Her work is part of the collections of the Saint Louis Art Museum, in St. Louis, USA, and the Museu de Arte do Rio, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In 2020, she was a recipient of Itaú Cultural’s Arte como Respiro public award.” via Fran Chang
