Hand, Held by Wah-Ming Chang and Shih-Ming Chang
Prose and photographs by Wah-Ming Chang
Drawings and paintings by Shih-Ming Chang
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“To archive is to devote oneself to a multiplicity of images, to a municipality of thought, to a slippery account of astonishments pausing the meter of the present.”
Wah-Ming Chang’s Hand, Held, with artwork by Shih-Ming Chang, is a 204-page monograph-memoir about writer Wah-Ming Chang and her father, the artist Shih-Ming Chang.
Hand, Held is built from four interlocking elements: Shih-Ming’s drawings and paintings, selected from his archive by Wah-Ming; Wah-Ming’s black-and-white photographs of her father’s studio in Queens, taken across a span of fifteen years, arranged in 3×3 grids inspired by Sol LeWitt’s 1980 photobook Autobiography; transcripts of recorded kitchen table conversations between the author and her parents, moving between three languages—one a homemade hybrid—crossing and catching; and Wah-Ming’s prose, which weaves together memoir, meditation, and nounal observation.
“What began for me as a gesture of curiosity—sneaking into my father’s studio to survey his still lifes—became one of documentation. I wanted to note what had changed between visits, and also what had not changed. What was being put to use, and what was gathering dust. To look at what my father took in. To capture dioramas of imagination.”
The result is a devoted book about devotion: to daily practice, to the act of looking, to the people we preserve inside us, and to the particular, irreplaceable dialect that forms between a parent and a child over a lifetime of reaching toward each other across the distance of languages adopted, molded, and dovetailing from surprising angles.
And a discovery: “From an early age, I wanted to absorb my father’s devotions: the daily practice of drawing and painting, tai chi, looking up a new word. But in sifting through and documenting the dailiness of his art, in making books out of it and sharing this deep essence of his practice, I found my own.”
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2026
Edition of 800
204 pages, paperback, 17×16 cm, b&w offset, sewn & glued
Printed on Arctic Munken Print Cream 115 and Pure Rough 300
Designed by Wah-Ming Chang and Sevinç Çalhanoğlu
ISBN 978-83-68165-14-2
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Wah-Ming Chang is a writer and bookmaker based in Brooklyn, New York, whose work explores the voids found in family mythologies. In the course of Hand, Held’s development, elements of the final assemblage were published in Abundant Number, Epiphany Magazine, and The Kenyon Review; exhibited in the 39 Footnotes group show at Accent Sisters (New York, 2025); and configured across a series of handmade publications.
Shih-Ming Chang is an artist based in Flushing, New York. He was born in Nanchong, China, in 1931, and has lived in Taipei and New York City most of his life, with stints on container ships and in Los Angeles. In 2005, once he moved to Flushing in retirement, he was able to pursue painting and drawing full-time.