DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Wednesday, April 15th 2009, 4:00 AM
Artist Lishan Chang in his Jamaica, Queens studio working on a dead animal.This art project is dead meat - even if critics love it.
Taiwan-born artist Lishan Chang is using road kill as the centerpiece of an art exhibit that will spotlight the harm modern civilization has wrought upon the natural world.
For the last six months, Chang, a multimedia artist from Woodside, has scoured highways and country roads looking for remains of creatures that never made it to the other side.
Chang uses taxidermy to preserve his grisly quarry, working in a downtown Jamaica studio that smells of flesh and salt from the macabre pursuit.
The project is about a year from completion, but Chang already envisions an eye-catching design: Costumed mannequins holding animal pelts in their hands - a representation, he said, of how they were killed by nameless, faceless humans.
Most of the dead animals, Chang said, were likely foraging for food when they wandered into the path of human civilization.
"They just want to survive," Chang, 39, said of the creatures. "It's just so sad - so sad. I wanted to say something about that."
Chang has photographed scores of roadside remains - deer, foxes, raccoons, rabbits, even dogs. He plans to create a photo exhibit using Google Earth that will map the location where each animal was killed.
On a recent morning, Chang wore a surgical mask as he labored over a Canada goose carcass. Behind him, the remains of a raccoon, a squirrel and a rabbit soaked in plastic vats filled with a chemical solution.
Chang, formerly an artist in residence at the lower Manhattan Cultural Council, is no stranger to unusual artistic media. He has previously used charred bread to reinterpret Chinese calligraphy and protest post-9/11 security crackdowns.
Chang said he likes to push the artistic envelope and force people to think about the concepts that underlie his work.
But he admitted that it took him some time - plus formal taxidermy training - before he could stomach handling road kill.
"You just have to prepare yourself to touch them," the artist said, noting he has preserved the remains of about 50 animals.
The project, currently titled "Accident Realm," is sponsored by the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts.
It will appear in a group exhibit in May 2010 at the Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art in Taiwan, said Chang, who hopes to land a solo exhibit in New York.
Chang said he also plans to exhibit the project at his Jamaica studio, which is owned by the Greater Jamaica Development Corp. and leased by chashama, a Manhattan-based arts group.
jlauinger@nydailynews.com
