Patty Chang

By Rae Nooney
Background
● Born 1972 in San Leandro, California
● Received BA from the University of California, 1994
● Shortly later moved to New York and became involved in the Performance
scene
● Her work has been exhibited nationwide and internationally at institutions such
as the MoMA, Guggenheim Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art, the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, and more
● Her work received a 2003 award from the Rockefeller Center, a 2012 Creative
Capital award, and in 2008 she was a finalist for the Hugo Boss Prize and a
Guna S. Mundheim Fellow in the Visual Arts at the American Academy in Berlin
● She currently lives and works in Los Angeles
Influences
● Frequently cited the work of Marina Abramovic and Jean Cocteau
○ “The influences of early performance artists like Abramovic and Ana Mendieta, who use their
own bodies to cross and blur boundaries separating film, video, photography, and live
performance; and that of surrealist cinema, with its ability to suture what appears to be
unconnected and to split what appears to be whole.”
● Early work focused on performance and the body while her more recent work
has been documentary filmmaking
○ “...Along with her partner, David Kelley, begun composing narratives that delicately explore a
nuanced dialogue between the East and West through the
interweaving of fact and fiction.”
Melons (At Loss) - 1998
https://vimeo.com/26829336
“A performance juggling a narrative of an imaginary cultural
ritual of receiving a plate at a relatives death with the act of
cutting and eating a melon while balancing a plate on the head.

Melons is a video based on images and script about my aunt’s

death from breast cancer and the emotion void in my memory.
The text is a construction of rituals that plays with notions of
the authentic. The act of juggling too much text and imagery
immerses the viewer in a third, imagined narrative.”
Untitled (Eels) - 2001

https://vimeo.com/26831124

“Video of eels in my shirt while laying on my back.”

 “I traveled to the Aral Sea in

Let Down (Milk) - 2017 Uzbekistan which lost over 70% of

its water due to Soviet era irrigation
projects. I traveled to the waterline
while along the way pumping breast
milk (I had recently given birth to my
son) into empty fish tins and cups,
and photographing them.
Uzbekistan is a police state where
photography of infrastructure is
limited; the intimate and abject
images of discarded breast milk
stand in as a daily record and for an
inability to represent and read a
landscape.”

http://www.pattychang.com/#/letdow
n-milk/
Sources
https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/patty-chang

http://www.pattychang.com/about/

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57a3a21859cc68cdfbfc0c9d/t/58e7b3fe1b10e3b4ed9bb294/149157
9904973/2003_xtra.pdf

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57a3a21859cc68cdfbfc0c9d/t/58e7b4bea5790a6a0ea474f8/149158
0100704/2014+%E2%80%9CArtAsiaPacific-+New+Terr...erview+With+Patty+Chang%E2%80%9D_2014.
pdf

http://www.pattychang.com/melons-at-a-loss/

http://www.pattychang.com/early-work/#/eels/