In the seven paintings that make up his Meditation series, Arnold Chang gives up conscious preparation, composition, and color theories, and paints by allowing his hand to swim carelessly across the paper. Chang’s approach resembles a myth mentioned by great writers such as Fernando Pessoa and William Yeats, that the human mind is able to reach a certain state, when the subconscious or unconscious takes over the mind and enters a state of automatic writing, or “psychography.” Widely practiced by and associated with witchcraft, spiritualism, and Zen Buddhism, psychography has long been regarded as some sort of magic.

In theory, painting without your mind as the director can easily result in a mess; yet Chang’s image is figurative in a way: the strokes swirl and interact, working together with the colors to produce a consistent tone. However, when the eye tries to sort out a recognizable shape or pattern in the image, it finds itself lost in the strokes’ dynamics, returning to the starting point in an effortless flow. In such a viewing process, the artist transports the audience to an elongated time and space for meditation, releasing the mind and allowing the unconsciousness to move in the same motion as the painting’s creation.