Confessions

Confessions is a public ritual for catharsis and consolation. Inspired by Japanese Shinto shrine prayer walls and the practices of Catholicism, Chang invited people to write and submit a confession on a wooden plaque in the privacy of confession booths in The Cosmopolitan’s P3 Studio gallery in the heart of the Las Vegas strip. She arranged the anonymous plaques on the gallery walls, painted select responses on 4’ x 4’ canvases, and orchestrated the space with an original ambient score by Oliver Blank. By the end of the exhibit, over 1,500 confessions were displayed in the room.

The confessions, which can be viewed on the project site, ranged from the light-hearted to the heart-breaking: I eat too much cheese, I’m scared I’ll die alone, I still love her two girlfriends and five years later, I sold heroin to my friend and it ruined his life, Came here married to one girl and left married to two girls, I stole over 15,000 from the company I work for, I like porn more than my husband does, I’m not as confident as the world thinks I am, I’m in the military and I’m scared to die, I don’t know what I am doing and I’m running out of time. The introspective project reappropriates religious rites for secular environments and examines how public spaces can cultivate self-realization and communal kinship. Commissioned by Art Production Fund and the Cosmopolitan.

The installation has also been featured in other cities: Minsk, Belarus at Ў Gallery of Contemporary Art in 2016 where more than 2,000 people participated; Athens, Greece in 2016 in collaboration with the Onassis Cultural Centre; London, England in 2017 in collaboration with Merge Festival and Hilton Bankside Hotel; Yerevan, Armenia in 2017 with support from Karoyan Gallery and Moscow Cinema and curated by Lilit Antonyan; San Diego in 2019 in collaboration with Wonderspaces.