Ernest Chang is a Hong Kong-based, United States-born artist. His activist and public work aims to raise awareness of mental health issues of adolescents and young adults living in Hong Kong. This case study of Chang’s series of twelve text-based artworks, titled Rigidity and Resilience (2018–2023), analyses the formal and discursive means of the way in which he brings – in his words – the tension between young people’s ‘self-expression and social conformity’. Working with English and Chinese handwritten ‘found text’, Chang includes in his pieces fragments of young people’s personal narratives of mental struggle, resilience and/or recovery. He superimposes them with large, spray-painted, Hong Kong Cantonese-based colloquial expressions (e.g., ‘屈機’,‘升呢’, ‘Add Oil’) and classical or formal Chinese idioms (e.g., ‘日行千里’, ‘感覺良好’). Using the small stories approach to narrative analysis (e.g. Georgakopoulou, 2006, 2015) and the concept of the ‘spectacle of writing’ (Jaworski, 2018; Lee, 2022), we demonstrate how Chang navigates between materialising the personal and social voices, referential and affective meaning potentials, and how his fragmentation of the ‘original’ texts and messages transforms them into public, polyphonic visions of mental distress and resilience.

References
Georgakopoulou, A. (2007). Small stories, interaction and identities. John Benjamins.
Georgakopoulou, A. (2015). Small stories research: Methods–analysis–outreach. In A. De Fina, & A. Georgakopoulou (Eds.), The handbook of narrative analysis (pp. 255-271). Wiley-Blackwell.
Jaworski, A. (2018). Writing as spectacle: Between aesthetics and politics. Paper presented at the Sociolinguistics Symposium 22, University of Auckland, 29 March 2018.
Lee, T.K. (2022). Spectacles of the Sinograph in Chinese literary and art productions. PRISM: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature, 19/1.