Newark Arts @ NICO | A body, a garden, a mind by Stella Chang

I am the first generation American born in my family, and my work lives in the space between what is inherited and what is remade. A Body, A Garden, A Mind is how I understand identity: not fixed or finished, but always growing, fracturing, and blooming again. Like a garden, the self is never still. It is always becoming; shaped by rupture, nourished by memory, and transformed by the quiet, persistent will to survive.
I work across watercolor, alcohol ink, acrylic, glass, digital, and 3D-printed sculpture, because no single material can hold the full complexity of what I am trying to say. Glass shatters. Ink bleeds. Paint layers and obscures. These are not accidents; they are how I work. Breaking the surface is both a literal and metaphorical act, honoring how personal and cultural histories fracture across generations, only to be reassembled into something that could not have existed before the breaking.
As a Taiwanese American woman, I have long navigated being perceived as one thing while feeling like another; whole while treated as partial, rooted while made to feel foreign. I do not make work to restore what was lost. I make work to discover what grows through it. This exhibition is that tending: an invitation to sit with contradiction, find beauty in reassembly, and recognize that the most alive things are always, in some way, still becoming.