INFO

Living With Images is the interdisciplinary design studio and practice of Johnny Chang, working across concept direction, visual identity, graphic design, art direction, illustration, exhibitions, books and publications, and artistic research. LWI is interested in the sense-making (and breaking)—or poetics—of discursive language and visual-material culture. If language is image-forming, our relationships between each other and things informed by images, if perceiving is to already form images, then what tools are needed to live with and reimagine our image-forming habits?

Alongside close dialogue and collaboration, Living With Images attentively works through research, insight, and feeling to poetically inquire into the social, political, and historical forces that shape everyday life—centering collective and resilient capacities for sensing and being.

We have collaborated with arts and culture institutions such as Stanley Picker Gallery, Konstfrämjandet, Grafikens Hus, Botkyrka Konsthall, Public Art Agency Sweden, Moderna Dance Teatern, and IASPIS.

With platforms and programs in the fields of contemporary art, film, architecture and spatial practice, academia, artistic research, and culture and community organizing: PARSE Journal, Luleåbiennalen 2024, Urgent Pedagogies, Noncitizen, Nonstop Timeless, Her Film, Story AB, Sonic Insurrections, Cyklopen, Astra Magazine, Architecture/Foreign Aid conference KTH, Kultwatch.se, and TACK/Communities of Tacit Knowledge, Architecture and it’s Ways of Knowing, an EU Horizon 2020 programme.

With artists, researchers, curators, choreographers, and filmmakers including Valeria Montti Colque who represented the Chilean Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2024, Macarena Dusant, Laleh Kazemi, Wingyee Wu, Stina Nyberg, Ian Kaler, Tatiana Pinto, mirko nikolić, Maryam Fanni, Jens Strandberg, Jenny Richards, My Lindh, Afrang Nordlöf Malekian, Munish Wadhia, Behzad Khosravi Noori, Mahoyo (Farah Yusef & MyNa Do), among others.

Our work has been presented at Salt Istanbul, Tensta konsthall, Kalmar konstmuseum, Botkyrka Konsthall, Super Collective Market by A—Z Presents, IASPIS, Slakthusateljéerna, Konstakademien, and Zita Folketsbio. Lina Alarabi was an intern in the spring of 2024.

Johnny Chang (b.1988 US-TW/SE) is an interdisciplinary designer, artist, and researcher. He worked at various agencies and studios in Los Angeles and New York City before moving to Stockholm, now primarily working with clients and collaborators in the field of arts and culture. Through occasional residencies, his artistic practice and research attends to questions of care, access, and tactics for gathering, listening to resilient knowledges from below that emerge from diaspora liminality, community memory, and social movement archiving. Through a citational practice, he works with the re/de/composition of material and symbolic-discursive residues to reflect on conditions and processes of social reproduction and relation.

Chang studied at Konstfack (MFA, 2019) and ArtCenter College of Design (BFA, 2010), and has been an artist-in-residence with Transgenic HKI 2021 (Strelka Institute/Iaspis/HIAP), Grafikens Hus Samlande tankar/Collecting Thoughts 2022–24, and the IASPIS Istanbul Exchange Program in collaboration with Salt in 2024.  He co-organises the mini culture house and community library Munnen, the slow publishing collective Wake Up, and the occasional publishing imprint (Something) Something. He was a juror for Grafikens Hus’s Call for Print 2022. He maintains a teaching practice, and has held lectures and workshops at KTH, Stockholm University, Konstfack, and Linneaus University, and has been an opponent and examiner for master students at Konstfack and Stockholm University.