Sara Sejin Chang (Sara van der Heide) – Four Months, Four Million Light Years, 2020

Adoption across borders has long intertwined humanitarian ideals with economic interests. Sara Sejin Chang examines how colonial narratives and image-making continue to shape the transracial and transnational adoption industry. Among the many countries from which children were adopted into the Global North, South Korea alone accounts for at least 200,000 adoptions since the Korean War ended in 1953. In Four Months, Four Million Light Years, Chang gathers film, textiles, banners, watercolours, shamanic songs and poems around Nicolaes Witsen’s colonial engraving Shaman or Devil’s Priest from the Tungus Land (1692), likely the earliest Western depiction of a shaman. Together, these elements connect the contemporary adoption industry to early Dutch capitalism and to older colonial ways of seeing Asia. Chang also reclaims shamanic traditions that Christian missionaries sought to suppress, honouring those separated from family, language, culture and ancestry.

Sara Sejin Chang (Sara van der Heide) creates immersive works across film, sound installation, text and painting, shaped by historical research and spiritual invocation. Her practice examines colonial narratives and questions Eurocentric systems of categorisation and racialisation within contemporary Western society. Through gestures that are both poetic and intimate, she proposes forms of repair, healing and belonging, while reconfiguring the structures through which notions of value and temporality are constructed.