Patty Chang

Spiritual Myopia is a sculptural video work dealing with the invisible labor and desire of residents of the oil-industry boom towns of Fort McMurray in the Canadian Tar Sands, and Port Arthur, Texas. The two towns are terminal nodes of the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline which would span the United States. Fort McMurray has the third largest oil deposit in the world. Its rapid pace of growth has meant a dearth of housing for its migrant workers. Port Arthur boasts the world’s largest concentration of oil refineries and its town center has nearly disintegrated from economic decline. These twin cities are related spatially as nodes in the same energy infrastructure, and temporally in their different stages of a boom or bust economy. Borrowing its title from Alfred Stieglitz’s photo Spiritual America, Spiritual Myopia speaks to the nearsightedness innate to hypercapitalism.

Chinatown is an evocative place. It exists in our cities, in our imaginations, on our television screens, and in our memories. It is at once a sprawling, vibrant immigrant community and a forgotten strip mall of buffet restaurants.

The film follows the fabrication and journey of a wooden submarine to the Three Gorges site on the Yangtze river—once a landscape most often depicted in traditional Chinese painting, now submerged to accommodate a hydroelectric dam. Wavering between documentary and fictional modes of address, Flotsam Jetsam explores landscape’s relationship to identity.

Patty Chang examines the idea of Shangri-La, the mythical hamlet of James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizon, which has come to represent a romanticized, exotic paradise in the English-speaking world. Chang’s video installation documents and explores her journey to an imaginary place—and to a town recently named Shangri-La by the Chinese government to exploit its touristic potential.

Two bodies make up one in this send up of the exotic stereotype.

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

In this dual-channel video, two separate scenes of the artist with a parent are juxtaposed. Chang faces her mother and, in the adjacent frame, appears face–to–face with her father. Simultaneously both images show the artist’s and respective parent’s faces pressed together in what at first appears to be a deep kiss. Gradually it becomes evident that the video is running in reverse time, and that they share not a kiss but rather an onion from which they both eat. They bite into it slowly, pausing as they take turns offering it to each other, as if it suggests the proverbial, forbidden fruit. Parent and child swallow before they take additional bites, blinking hard to hold back tears from the onion’s sharpness and pungency. However, in the video’s reversal of time, the onion is reconstituted and the tears disappear—wholeness is thus regained.

A video work that visually alludes to Andrew Wyeth's painting "Christina's World" (1948) and depicts Chang on a suburban lawn that is curiously destabilizing.

Wearing different wigs, I am fed water filled helium balloons.

I had this calendar from Fredricks of Hollywood on my wall and there was an air purifier that I used to prop the door open. I would hear rhythmic fluttering of paper and the calendar was moving between images in a sort of dance.

Inspired in part by a performance by Marina Abramovic and Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus. I eat an onion with a woman, then we kiss. The footage is played backwards and starts with kissing and crying before the onion emerges.

Made on the 89th floor of the World trade center during a residency with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.

A video work that visually alludes to Andrew Wyeth's painting "Christina's World" (1948) and depicts Chang on a suburban lawn that is curiously destabilizing.

Death of Game is the remake of a scene from Bruce Lee's film, Game of Death. The mid seventies was a period of growing visibility of actors of color in Blaxploitation and Asian action films. These genres both gave mainstream exposure to but also paradoxically reinforced the stereotypes of Blacks and Asians. The moment of the meeting and subsequent fight between Bruce Lee and Kareem Abdul Jabar represents a point of contact defiantly outside of a dominant, white culture.

Fountain is a video that originated from a live performance of drinking water from a mirror. The image of confronting one’s own image recalls Narcissus, the Greek god that fell in love with his own image without recognizing it as his own, in some way being a splitting of the interior and exterior selves. In Fountain the image attempts to become whole again by drinking in the image of itself.

Wrestling in the water with a blow up doll.

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.

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.

Chang shaved her pubic hair with Perrier while blindfolded using touch to guide action.

Chang shaved her pubic hair with Perrier while blindfolded using touch to guide action.

An intense blending of horror genre, date movies, and dark themes of voyeurism, fantasy, brutality and hard core porn.