Harmke Datema-Chang is a Netherlands-based artist whose practice centers on long-term, large-scale artworks that operate within real social, economic, and institutional systems. Born and raised in the Netherlands with Chinese roots, her work is shaped by questions of cultural inheritance, exchange, and how value is constructed and maintained across contexts.
She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Illustration and Design from HKU Utrecht and a Master of Art and Education from Amsterdam, where she developed a research-driven practice focused on art as a catalyst for multiperspectivity, collective responsibility, and critical reflection.
Datema-Chang works primarily with large-scale installations, museum exhibitions, and permanent outdoor sculptures. Her practice is inherently collaborative, yet firmly authored—using exchange, dialogue, and shared risk as core artistic materials. Through working closely with other artists, institutions, and communities internationally, she investigates how artistic meaning is negotiated, preserved, or erased within systems of power and economy.
She is the artist and author of BUY OR BURN (2019–ongoing), a durational performative artwork that confronts notions of value, ownership, and preservation through public auctions in which unsold artworks are destroyed. Developed over five years and realized in multiple international contexts, the project positions the audience as active participants in determining the fate of cultural production.
While BUY OR BURN operates through public risk and destruction, Datema-Chang’s studio practice focuses on the opposite force: creation as preservation and protection. Both emerge from the same inquiry into value, responsibility, and agency. Where BUY OR BURN exposes systems that decide what is allowed to disappear, her paintings and sculptures insist on what must be made, held, and carried forward as a heritage.
Alongside her artistic practice, Datema-Chang actively builds and supports artist-led infrastructures. She founded the Dutch branch of NoEsUnaGalería, an international collective rooted in Mexico City and the Netherlands, dedicated to rethinking artistic value through radical, artist-driven exhibitions and events.
Her work consistently navigates the tension between individual authorship and collective action, insisting on art as a site of responsibility, risk, and agency.
