Crabs on a Marsh

In this work Chang depicted live crabs on marshy ground. Two large and two small crabs crawl in the upper part of the picture, and those in the corners—barely perceivable forms in ink and blue paint—seem bogged down in the marsh. Chang's blending of translucent washes throughout the background did not obscure the blackness of the creatures. Instead of reproducing exactly what she saw before her, Chang treated her subject in a stylized fashion. Only two of the crabs are fi guratively rendered; the others are distorted into dabs of ink and arbitrarily arranged.