Bernard Chang’s latest solo exhibition, Earth’s Palette – Climate Dialogues, has opened at the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s Jockey Club Museum of Climate Change.
Chang trained and worked as an architect for more than two decades before turning to painting full-time. That background is evident, though not in any literal sense. His compositions feel constructed – almost mapped out – yet the surfaces remain restless. Lines shift. Color bleeds. The structure never quite settles.
The exhibition brings together five series of paintings that consider the strain between urban growth and the natural environment. Rather than offering easy answers, the works hold that tension: between concrete and coastline, expansion and erosion, ambition and consequence.
In Cities and Nature, tower blocks edge into the frame, pressing up against areas of green that look as if they’re shrinking. You find yourself scanning the boundary between the two. Nothing explodes or collapses; the pressure just builds quietly.
Journey of Iceberg shifts the mood. The colors turn colder – deep blues, grayed whites – and the forms feel heavier, as if weighed down. The ice doesn’t break apart in some theatrical way. It seems too thin and drifts, almost unnoticed.
In Coastline Erosion, blurred horizons mark where waves gnaw at fortified shores, structures tilting subtly as land yields to water – a gradual erosion rather than a single dramatic event.
Throughout the exhibition, the artist highlights changes so gradual they risk passing unseen. Climate change is the theme, but Chang doesn’t treat it as a headline. He is more interested in perspective – in how cities expand, how they justify that expansion, and what gets pushed out of view. His architectural training is evident in his approach to scale and layout. Painting, however, gives him room to slow that thinking down and look at what those systems cost.
What emerges is a reminder that the marks of climate change are already embedded in the skylines and shorelines cities continue to reshape.
Earth’s Palette – Climate Dialogues runs at the Jockey Club Museum of Climate Change, CUHK, until April 28. It is well worth visiting.
Bernard Charnwut Chan is the chairman of the West Kowloon Cultural District
