Portraiture has always been a slightly misleading art form. A good portrait gives the viewer the sense that they can peer into the essence of the sitter. It’s a glimpse, a passing moment in a person’s life. But to know someone more fully, we have to see them in their totality, from birth to death, through all the major seasons of their life and in relationship with their most important people.
I first came across the expansive portraiture of artist John Clang in 2010 when he began the Being Together series, which depicts diasporic families photographed together via Skype. A Singaporean artist living far from family after moving to New York, Clang stages the photos so that one half of the family is projected onto the wall, as if in the physical presence of the other half.
For those of us living in diaspora with loved ones in other countries, togetherness also means being together across time. Some live in an ostensible future and others in an ostensible past, both close together and distant. As Clang wrote in a piece for LensCulture, diasporic families can be “made whole again through the use of a third space, a site that is able to reassemble them together within the photographic space that we call a family portrait.”
In Reading by an Artist, an ongoing performance series that began in 2023, Clang pulls from a decade-long study of ziwei doushu (紫微斗数), sometimes called purple star astrology in English. It’s a philosophical and astrological system dating back to Tang dynasty China and originally designed to make sense of royals’ destiny through a chart structure of 12 palaces. These palaces are laid out as a square border comprising smaller individual squares that represent elements like the self, finances, siblings, and travel.
Reading by an Artist was staged this year at the National Gallery Singapore, the Sharjah Biennial, and most recently, the Summer Reads group show at New York’s Galerie Lelong, where I visited him for a reading earlier this month. Although he occasionally conducts readings by request through his website, his series is experienced through scheduled performances, including one in the upcoming Ghost 2568: Wish We Were Here in Bangkok, Thailand, starting October 15.
In popular apps like CHANI and Co–Star, users plug in their birth date and location and receive a natal chart that references one’s Sun, Moon, and Rising sign, along with other details. These charts come from Western astrology, whose roots can be traced back to the Babylonian system, and every day, users can get a glimpse of what astrological forces may be shaping their lives.
It’s a similar process for ziwei doushu: Clang requested basic details around my birth date in advance of our session so he could develop a chart. Getting a reading done by the artist transformed the experience, as he mediated the process through conversation. When I sat down with him at Galerie Lelong, he had a paper notebook and a tablet propped up on a stand. He pulled up my chart with a printout and on the screen in front of me, a series of squares with each palace laid out. The tablet app he used allowed him to move forward and backward by decades in my life, capturing different versions of me through time and space.
Clang then homed in on a few squares: my Life palace to point out my challenges with burnout, my Career palace to note what he calls my “scholar energy,” and my Travel palace to observe my frequent sojourns. With each series of observations, he did a gut check with me to make sure his reading was landing effectively. It did.
At this point, a skeptic could argue that these broad observations stem from topics I’ve written about publicly before (a quick look at my Hyperallergic bio and datelines, for example, would confirm my frequent travel) and could just as easily have been Googled. The skeptic would be right, to a certain extent, but the reading was just getting started. And in any case, that critique would miss the point of Clang’s work.
In an interview with me after our session, Clang reflected on his portraiture practice and how it led him to take an interest in astrology.
“What if I started to do a portrait, but this time without a camera? You can go back to the past — camera obscura, sketching, and all these things without cameras. And then I just wanted something that’s actually more conceptual and more internal as well,” he remarked.
That’s when Clang discovered ziwei doushu. His initial thought, he said, was “maybe I could perform it to debunk the whole thing,” as he had come across poor and generic readings after a couple of years of study. He then spent another eight years studying in different schools of thought, developing his own system and style as an artist and shifu (“expert”).
But he still wasn’t ready to perform. “I spent two or three years trying to see if one can shape the narrative of the chart,” he said. “If it’s bad, can we make it to something positive? And not just say, ‘Oh, it’s gonna be bad,’ and the person walks out of here feeling terrible.”
“The whole concept is to create a portrait of the person,” he continued. “The internal portrait is for them to control their own destiny. So they first have to know their destiny.”
And what is my destiny, according to Clang’s reading? As the decades turn, so do the palaces and their relationships to each other, and different aspects of our lives become more important. Clang starts his readings by looking first at the past few decades, establishing both trust with each other and the chart. Without this trust, a practitioner in Tang dynasty China wouldn’t have been able to get past the intense skepticism of the Imperial court, which tested visitors before allowing them to meet with the king. And for the non-royals among us, this trust makes the readings about one’s future more resonant.
A proper ziwei doushu reading typically takes a whole day, and we only had an hour. We focused on a few palaces, including my Friendship palace. My chart indicated that I’ll continue to make friends over the next few decades, some of whom will be quite important to the direction of my life. As an elder millennial, I see the loneliness epidemic all around me, and can confirm that we’re a very lonely generation. This narrative shift that Clang encouraged in me has reminded me to stay open and curious about new people in my life. A few days after the reading, I did in fact meet some lovely people who felt like new long-term friends entering my life. I still haven’t met all the people who will love me and whom I will love, and that’s a powerful part of the internal self-portrait I carry with me as I make my life decisions.
Clang’s installation at Galerie Lelong included pictures of people with their faces obscured by colored squares from his Sans the Face series, photographed in Hong Kong (2019–ongoing), a meditation on digital surveillance. He also installed an array of colored squares with testimonials from people who had received readings from him. Many of these can be viewed online. One participant, E, wrote, “This was and is a fascinating experience to paint a virtual portrait of my life together with another — akin to an artist showing me my palette and for me to pick up that brush to paint.”
During our reading, Clang sketched out a few dots, each representing various decades in my life, from the 2000s to the 2030s.
“If I read for you in 2000, or if I read for you in the 2030s, the reading will be the same,” he said. The difference, he noted, is that when he reads for the past, I can explain to him what happened. The future remains unknown to us, but in his practice of ziwei doushu, it’s all part of the portrait.
It reminded me of his Skype family portraits — images of togetherness outside the bounds of time and space. “For me, there is no such thing as past, present, or future,” he said. “They’re all one line to me. For me, it’s just one piece of paper.”
