Art and Film by Nick Chang

Artist's Statement:

Growing up in Hawai‘i in the 2000s, my life was shaped by a fascination with aviation, space, and science fiction. The dawn of the information age promised a future of limitless creativity, where advances in CGI and personal computing meant one could conjure entire worlds from imagination alone.

Today, those early hopes for a bold new future feel increasingly unfulfilled. Media has settled into cycles of sequels and remakes, and the tools that once symbolized freedom of expression are now more constrained than ever. The market for creative content feels saturated and nigh-impossible to break into.

There's never been more, and yet there's never been less.

This tension between promise and reality informs much of my work. My current series explores these themes through digital art, film and animation. It reflects childhood passions and the optimism of early digital culture—an era when originality thrived, and art wasn’t optimized for algorithms or engagement metrics. Through these pieces, I aim to evoke both nostalgia and critique: a return to the spirit of experimentation, and a reminder of what creativity can be when it’s unconstrained.