Candy Chang com­bines her expe­ri­ence as an urban plan­ner, artist, and designer to bring new per­spec­tives to the field of urban design. Candy aims to make cities more accom­mo­dat­ing for peo­ple by improv­ing pub­lic spaces and com­mu­ni­ca­tion devices, retool­ing them with the goal of enabling cities to share infor­ma­tion on a micro and macro level, from the cit­i­zen to the com­mu­nity.

Candy’s work incites the type of per­son to per­son inter­ac­tion in a com­mu­nity nec­es­sary to cre­ate a dia­logue fos­ter­ing indi­vid­ual expres­sion. In I Wish This Was, she pro­vided a forum for a dia­logue about New Orleans res­i­dents’ wishes and needs in the form of thou­sands of stick­ers, which were made avail­able in book­stores, hair salons, cof­fee shops, and cor­ner stores, to name a few places. She cur­rently resides in New Orleans, which, with its many empty store­fronts and vacant build­ings, pro­vides a per­fect forum for peo­ple to imag­ine what they would most like the space to be. The project’s scope is larger than this par­tic­u­lar loca­tion, how­ever. Candy has made the stick­ers avail­able for any­one to order, bring­ing the dia­logue to a transna­tional play­ing field so that any­one can shape the devel­op­ment of a com­mu­nity. She says she was pleas­antly sur­prised by the amount of thought­ful responses, and that it was inter­est­ing to see how the responses dif­fered by neighborhood.

One of her ongo­ing projects, Before I Die, is a wall sized inter­ac­tive chalk­board in which peo­ple can fill in the end of the phrase. The project is fea­tured in Sub­text Projects’ FREERIDING show at East/​West Gal­leries. It will also be installed on build­ings in New Orleans and will con­tinue to grow in var­i­ous other pub­lic spaces. The hope is that com­mu­ni­ca­tion on an indi­vid­ual level in com­mu­ni­ties will cul­ti­vate a more enrich­ing and sub­stan­tive phys­i­cal environment.

Two other projects that add to the inti­macy and com­mu­nity feel­ing of a neigh­bor­hood are It’s Good to Be Here and You Make Me Feel So Mah­tava. In these Candy uses tem­po­rary spray chalk to imbue mean­ing into a place you could find your­self stand­ing, such as the side­walk in front of a café, or out­side of a record or gro­cery store. Mah­tava, which means awe­some, is the first word she learned in Fin­land, where she lived for a year and a half.

In another project, Candy calls atten­tion to street ven­dors. There are over 10,000 ven­dors in New York City, and though it may seem like a sim­ple job, they face cer­tain risks inher­ent to the trade. For exam­ple, the fine for park­ing over 18 inches from the curb is $1,000. Many ven­dors do not know their rights or how to avoid fines because the rule­book does not cater to those whose first lan­guage is not Eng­lish. Ven­dor Power is a pam­phlet that explains ven­dors’ rights in five lan­guages. Candy dis­trib­uted these to thou­sands, and the project was fea­tured in the New York Times, Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Arts, TYPO, and the 2010 National Design Tri­en­nial by the Smith­son­ian, Cooper-​Hewitt, National Design Museum.

Candy’s newest project is called Look­ing for Love in Fair­banks, which brought her all the way to Alaska to do an instal­la­tion on the Polaris Build­ing, the tallest in the city. The project calls on the com­mu­nity for help in re-​imagining a space left unused for over ten years. Peo­ple are invited to share their mem­o­ries on the building’s past as well as their hopes for its future, cre­at­ing a dia­logue that illu­mi­nates a past, present, and future of the city of Fair­banks and the forces that shaped it.

Candy is a 2011 TED Senior Fel­low and has a B.A. in Archi­tec­ture and a B. F. A. in Graphic Design from the Uni­ver­sity of Michi­gan, as well as a Master’s in Urban Plan­ning from Colum­bia Uni­ver­sity. She also co-​founded Red Antenna, which is both a design firm and record label in New York City, and has received a Tulane/​Rockefeller Urban Inno­va­tion Chal­lenge Fel­low­ship this year. Her work has been dis­played at the National Design Museum, Koltsovo Inter­na­tional Air­port, and many other unde­vel­oped urban areas.

Check out more of Candy’s work here.

Tags: Alaska, architecture, Candy Chang, communications, community, Fairbanks, Finland, New Orleans, New York City, public space, street vendors, urban design, wishes

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This entry was posted on Sunday, April 17th, 2011 at 2:07 am and is filed under Art.
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