An Accumulation of Murmurs: Chang Yuchen on Coral Dictionary

Chang Yuchen’s Coral Dictionary began far from the studio or gallery—in an initially unsettling encounter with living coral off the shores of Malaysia’s Pulau Dinawan. Back on land and presented with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of washed-up coral fragments, Yuchen began sorting these by fluid, provisional correspondences among their endlessly varied forms, a process that revealed unexpectedly elastic connections between shape and meaning. What emerged was the beginning of a living lexicon, transcribed and collocated for the page through the artist’s intricate pencil drawings. Since 2019, her initial accordion-folded dictionary has become a conduit for evolving experiments in teaching and sharing the language with others.

The language of Yuchen’s Coral Dictionary is something porous and collective, not imposed by decree but accumulated from careful, sustained attention to the form and variation, the iterative rhythm of everyday conversation and storytelling.