His distinctive work is known the world over. Philip Key meets Peter Chang JUST when you think you have seen it all, you come across the jewellery and sculptures of Peter Chang. His work is like nothing you have seen before. All highly coloured, they seem to have a life of their own, almost creature-like in design and sometimes rather spooky. His bracelets are massive in size with all sorts of protuberances, his brooches uncannily lifelike, while his sculptures look as if they could walk off on their own. Amazingly, no two pieces are alike. His wild designs are produced just once, and then it is onto something even odder. While each piece is different from the next, there is no problem in identifying a piece by Peter Chang. Look at any item and you realise only Chang with his curious imagination could have created it. Made mostly from acrylic and polyester plastics, his pieces have made him one of the most collectible of artists, with fans across the world, from Germany and New York to Australia. Just how breathtaking these works are can soon be seen in a new exhibition, Unnatural Selection, at Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery from June 15. Chang, 62, seems an unlikely candidate for international recognition, brought up in the black and white world of post-war Liverpool. His Liverpool mother and Chinese seaman father were not married. “That was a bit of a taboo in those days, particularly with mixed blood,” says Chang. So his mother went to stay with relatives in London for the birth, but was back in the city five days later with her new baby. “For my first 20 years, we lived in Upper Huskisson Street in Toxteth,” Chang explains. Times were tough but pleasurable and there were days out to New Brighton and West Kirby where he and friends collected cockles. The Pier Head was a favourite haunt. Once a friend caught a pigeon which Chang took home to his uncle who cooked it. He was one of a number of Chinese children from Liverpool picked to star in the Ingrid Bergman film, The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, filmed in Snowdonia. He was given two lines, sang a song and picked up £26 for his troubles. “I know roughly where I am in the film but it goes by in a flash,” he says. But he was always drawing and painting, although when he took his 13- Plus, he wanted to get into technical school. He didn’t, but he got his second choice, art school in Gambier Terrace. His life might have been very different if he had got into technical school. In his teens, he became part of the music scene with the group The Chants, not actually appearing on stage but working the tape recorder and such. At one time, the group was given backing by The Beatles at The Cavern. When Paul McCartney opened his own exhibition at the Walker, Chang reminded him of the time but, unfortunately, McCartney could not remember it. Chang has sent him an invitation to his exhibition opening, anyway. Plans to become the road manager of The Chants were abandoned when Chang went to art college in Hope Street. “I vaguely fancied being a printer at the time as they earned good money but fell into art college as most of my mates went there.” He did well and won a scholarship for a postgraduate course which allowed him to study in Paris. He worked with a printer, SW Hayter, who has taught printing to people like Picasso, Max Ernst and Miro. Back in Britain, he studied at the Slade School in London, working with another well-known printer Anthony Gross and later with sculptor Reg Butler. He did not have the money to take up the third year of study offered, but applied to the Alfred Holt Trust, explaining that his father had worked for them as a Shanghai sailor. He was given a bursary. He had plans for more study – “anything to avoid reality” – but now married with a child he moved back to Liverpool where his artist wife had a teaching job. He became “a bit of a drop-out”, he admits. He was making furniture, making trophies, doing advertising agency work, anything to make an income. But when his wife Barbara became head of textile printing at Glasgow School of Art, they moved to Glasgow where he still lives and where his international career really took off. He started making jewellery simply because his wife asked him to make her some. “I just made them with materials lying round my workshop,” he says. That simple request turned his life around with his work going into several public collections – the Walker has one – winning prizes and exhibiting everywhere. But is it art or craft? Chang does not like labels: “Art is an umbrella word for all sorts of things including music, painting and sculpture,” he says. “Craft is technique, Rembrandt had great craft. But it is a word usually associated with making things like chairs or corn dollies, often using a repeated pattern. Maybe I should not say this but there is not a lot of creativity associated with craft.” Even so, his work has been shown in several craft exhibitions. “There is a terrific amount of snobbery between the various art forms.” He suggests he is better known in Scotland than England (the Walker exhibition should change that) and that he had gone out of favour a bit in Britain, possibly as a result of exhibiting more in international exhibitions rather than national ones. “A lot of my work is sold to foreign buyers, mainly in Germany and America”. As for influences, he remarks that his reading in Chinese philosophy may be one, “the way it treats nature, just go with the flow”. Carl Jung’s writing on synchronicity also made him think, the idea of “happy accidents”. A whole list of artists can be added to his list: “But when you grow up you start thinking for yourself”. Thinking for himself has certainly created a unique collection of objects which will go on show at the Walker, alongside early and contemporary drawings, prints and sculptures. UNNATURAL Selection opens on June 15 and runs until September 30. philkey | 
