Butterfly Dreams - David Khang
Centre A is delighted to announce our next exhibition, Butterfly Dreams by David Khang!
From early experiments inspired by La Monte Young’s Compositions 1960 to his striking performances in Los Angeles and Mexico, this exhibition showcases Khang’s exploration with the monarch butterflies over two decades, weaving together performance, sculpture, and photography. Khang often produces work that brings together incongruous and dissonant elements. While the Monarch butterfly is universally viewed as a signifier of beauty, military signifiers are inseparably woven together in Khang’s works with the butterfly motif, intended to evoke unsettled reception. Khang believes formal aesthetics and beauty without context separates and elevates art above the everyday; Site-specific or site-responsive art practice imbeds itself and lays bare the political, social, and cultural context of the everyday from which the art is produced.
Opening Reception: Saturday, April 18, 6–9 PM, including a performance at 7:30 PM
Panel Discussion: Saturday, May 9, 2 PM, featuring David Khang, Glenn Alteen, and Larissa Lai
Exhibition Duration: April 18 - May 30, 2026
Location: #205-268 Keefer St. (2nd floor of the Sun Wah Centre)
Gallery Hours: Wed–Sat, 12–6 PM
In 1960 La Monte Young wrote Compositions 1960, a series of text-based musical scores that called into question the definition and nature of music and sound. One such score was Composition #5: Turn a butterfly (or any number of butterflies) loose in the performance area.
When the composition is over, be sure to allow the butterfly to fly away outside. The composition may be any length but if an unlimited amount of time is available, the doors and windows may be opened before the butterfly is turned loose and the composition may be considered finished when the butterfly flies away.
In 2004, at Track 16 Gallery in Los Angeles, Khang performed Speaking of Butterflies. After carefully tethering Monarch butterflies with silk sutures to his tongue (an organ of speech), Khang untethered the sutures, then released the butterflies to fly away outside.
In 2025, Khang produced Camuflaje in the forested mountains of Michoacán, Mexico, the wintering grounds for Monarch butterflies. Khang performed as Militant Monarch - a soldier dressed in butterfly-patterned fatigues - at the only place in the world where this soldier can truly camouflage.
These two projects become bookends for Khang’s works with butterflies over the past two decades. Over this period, Khang produced a series of projects - sculptures, collages, photographs, and performance videos - some of which have been selected for this exhibition.
What began as a curious encounter and experimentation with La Monte Young’s Compositions 1960 more than twenty years ago, has turned into a body of work that explores the Monarch butterfly materially and metaphorically with intersections in political, environmental, and cultural spheres. Khang brings together these elements for this exhibition, Butterfly Dreams, into a layered meditation that evokes dreams that hopes to reimagine and reshape our everyday realities.
Artist Bio:
David Khang's interdisciplinary practice is informed by education in psychology, theology, dentistry, and law. Khang selectively borrows their disciplinary codes into his work, to compose interdisciplinary languages in visual, textual, and spoken forms. By integrating performance into his practice, Khang embodies these languages - his body becoming a material to interrogate the intersecting relationships between gender, race, class, and species (what it means to be human). By site-specifically deploying non-native languages in performances, his voice provokes dissonant readings, in order to evoke re-imagining of poetics and politics.
Khang received his BSc and DDS (University of Toronto), BFA (Emily Carr Institute of Art+Design), and MFA with Emphasis in Critical Theory (UC Irvine), for which he studied with Jacques Derrida, Etienne Balibar, and Fred Moten. Khang was a 2007 recipient of the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art Award, and multiple BC Arts Council and Canada Council for the Arts grants. Khang has taught at Emily Carr University of Art+Design (2005-2016) and Goddard College (2009-2010). In 2021, Khang received his JD with Specializations in Aboriginal Law and Environmental Law (University of British Columbia). Khang resides in Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Territories, where he divides his time between art, dentistry, and law.
Post Image: Camuflaje 2026. Photo credit: Manuel Cisneros.
Cover Image: David Khang performing in front of a live audience, dressed in a monarch-butterfly-patterned wrestler costume and preparing to climb into a grand piano. Photo credit: Brandon Leung.