Patty Chang (born February 3, 1972, in San Leandro, California)[1] is an American performance artist and film director living and working in Los Angeles, California.[1] Originally trained as a painter, Chang received her Bachelor of Arts at the University of California, San Diego. It wasn't until she moved to New York that she became involved with performance art.[2]
Chang's performative works deal with themes of gender, language and empathy, and she was described as "one of our most consistently exciting young artists" by The New York Times in 2005.[6] Originally trained as a painter,[7] she is primarily known for her short films, videos and performance art. Chang has participated in films as body dubbing which allows studios to remake films with more international casts.[clarification needed]
Chang often plays a central role in her own work, testing the acceptable boundaries of taste and endurance. Some of her work contains scatological elements, while others critique perceptions of female sexual roles. Chang often denounces the problems that she observes in contemporary society by staging her own body in intensely difficult situations, documenting her actions through video and photography. She began to take a more "behind the scenes" role and became "perhaps the least visible she has ever been in her own work[8]” in her 2005 exhibition Shangri-La based on the fictional location in James Hilton's 1933 novel Lost Horizon. More recent work, especially "Invocation for The Wandering Lake" (2015–16), draws connections between landscape and the body.[9] Many aspects of Chang's work connect back to her Asian culture[which?] such as her interest in Shangri-La as well as her criticism of Asian female stereotypes in her work Contortion (2000). Milk Debt, her solo exhibition at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn was drew on of collective anxiety and featured a running script, the read by women pumping their breast milk in Hong Kong, Santa Monica, Los Angeles, and the US-Mexico border.[10]
In addition she has staged solo shows in major cities, including Patty Chang at Jack Tilton Gallery, New York (1999),[1]Ven conmigo, nada contigo. Fuente. Melones. Afeitada. at Museo National de Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain (2000),[11]Patty Chang: Shangri-La at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and the New Museum, New York (2005),[12]Flotsam Jetsam with longtime collaborator David Kelley[13] at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2014),[14] and her most extensive exhibition to date, Patty Chang: The Wandering Lake, 2009-2017, at the Queens Museum, in New York City (2017-18).[15] Her show The Wandering Lake also showed in Los Angeles. Chang exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston where she was a part of Read My Lips that was up until May 2020.
Filmography
Title
Release Year
Gong Li with the Wind
1996
Paradice
1996
Melons (At a Loss)
1998
Shaved (At A Loss)
1998
Fountain
1999
Contorsion
2000
Losing Ground
2000
Hand to Mouth
2000
Eels
2001
In Love
2001
Shangri-La
2005
Condensation of Birds
2006
Flotsam Jetsam
2007
The Product Love – Die Ware Liebe
2009
Rather to Potentialities
2009
Route 3
2011
Current
2012
Invocation for a Wandering Lake, Part 1
2014
Spiritual Myopia
2015
Configurations
2017
Milk Debt (still)
2020
Milk Debt
2021
Selected exhibitions
Year
Exhibition
Location
2005
Patty Chang
Hammer Museum in Los Angeles
2006
The 1st at Moderna: Patty Chang
Moderna Museet
2008
New Directors/New FIlms Festival
The Museum of Modern Art
2014
Flotsam Jetsam / Patty Chang and David Kelley
The Museum of Modern Art
2018
Patty Chang: The Wandering Lake, 2009–2017
Queens Museum, New York
2020
Patty Chang: Ven conmigo, nada contigo. Fuente. Melones. Afeitada
^Chang, Patty (2005). Patty Chang : Shangri-la. Ferguson, Russell., Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center., New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York, N.Y.), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago, Ill.). Los Angeles: Hammer Museum. ISBN0943739292. OCLC71296449.
