“Dismemberment” sounds violent, but in the work of Sara Sejin Chang (Sara van der Heide) it describes something closer to healing. In shamanic traditions the term refers to a symbolic, spiritual process in which an existing identity is taken apart and reassembled – painful, but opening the way to profound change. It is also the title of the Korean-Dutch artist’s first survey exhibition in Germany, which opens tonight, 13 November 2026, at the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst (GfZK) Leipzig and runs from 14 November until 28 February 2027.
Fifteen years of looking at Europe from the outside in
Curated by Sabine Weier with assistant curator Hanar Hupka and scenography by Julia Gerke, the exhibition gathers works from the past fifteen years across film, installation and painting. Their common thread is Eurocentric thinking and the colonial structures that still shape the present – approached, as the GfZK puts it, with tongue-in-cheek, enchanting forms of healing that reach beyond the individual to society as a whole.
The range is wide. In Brussels (2016, 2017) Chang observes the normalisation of far-right politics in Europe and portrays the city as its faltering centre. Other works trace the colonial history of transracial adoption, through which children from the Global South – as many as 200,000 from South Korea alone, according to the exhibition – were taken to Western Europe and the United States. The German Library Pyongyang (2012/2026) revives a Goethe-Institut library in North Korea with banners, a card index, furniture and books.
Goethe, the Bauhaus and the claim to universality
A substantial part of the show tackles colour. Series such as Colour Theory Exercises 1–20, Claim to Universality (2011–12), Zur Farbenlehre, Colour and Background (after Goethe) with a glass prism, and the 558 watercolours of Hollands Kabinet (2010–12) ask how the colour theories of Goethe and the Bauhaus shaped European views of the world – and how “universal” those views ever were. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe has a House in 169 Places (2015) turns the global network of Goethe-Instituts into 169 business cards.
At the core are two shamanic film installations: Dismemberment (2024, 45 minutes), shown with watercolours, a fan and ashes, and Four Months, Four Million Light Years (2020, 35 minutes), with textiles and paper works.
An artist on the international circuit
Chang has taken part in the Biennale de Lyon, the Busan Biennale 2022, the 11th Berlin Biennale and the 36th São Paulo Biennial. Her work is held by the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Van Abbemuseum, Moderna Museet in Stockholm and the MMCA in Seoul. In 2023 she received the Theodora Niemeijer Prize for outstanding female artists in the Netherlands, and this year Utrecht’s Centraal Museum showed her first comprehensive Dutch solo exhibition at Landhuis Oud Amelisweerd.
The opening at 7 pm is free; a curator-led tour with Hanar Hupka follows on 6 December. For anyone interested in how art can hold history, identity and a sense of humour in the same room, Leipzig is the place to be this winter.