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Patty Chang | 《ArtAsiaPacific》Cover Story,JUL/AUG 2019

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《ArtAsiaPacific》2019 JUL/AUG Issue 114 Cover Story,

The Wandering Lake

Reposted and Excerpt from 《Abject, Exposed and Potent Desires》on《ArtAsiaPacific》written by Isabelle Cheung. Copyright ? 《ArtAsiaPacific》

* To see more, please check《ArtAsiaPacific》JUL/AUG 2019 Issue 114

Abject, Exposed and Potent Desires

By Ysabelle Cheung

Milk Debt unpacks many of Chang’s recent concerns around grief, mortality and the environment, yet also harkens back to her earliest works—which dissect the body and identity—developed during her provocative early years in New York beginning in the mid-1990s. Though she was initially interested in becoming a painter, she pivoted to performance after studying under artist Eleanor Antin—a performance artist who famously took photographs of her naked, emaciated self during a month of crash dieting—for her BFA at the University of California San Diego. After graduating in 1994, she moved to New York and aligned herself with experimental art and underground club movements, performing at art spaces such as Exit Art and downtown galleries, as well as intersectional venues such as the Meatpacking District’s Clit Club and Performance Space 122 in the East Village. At these events, Chang staged seemingly unscripted actions that perverted tropes of femininity, such as holding a crystal ball between her teeth, forcing herself to smile, while wearing a traditional white wedding gown; gorging herself on phallic hot dogs; or smashing eggs that she had stued inside her pantyhose, with the ovum sliming down her legs and ruining her prim, working-girl suit.

Chang’s performances from the late 1990s and early 2000s played not only with sexuality and the feminine Asian identity, but mixed them provocatively with cultural taboos. In Melons (1998), she eats scoops of her own “breasts”—juice-yielding cantaloupe strapped in her brassiere—while speaking about the death of her aunt. In For Abramovic? Love Cocteau (2000), Chang riffs on artist Marina Abramovic?’s 1996 gesture of consuming a raw vegetable, as Chang and another female performer—who uncannily resembles herself—take turns eating a white onion, passing it back and forth between their mouths. The recorded footage of this action is played backward in the video so that the onion is gradually re-formed and the two figures’ stream of tears shrinks to drops. Later, Chang recorded the same intimate action with each of her parents for the two-channel video In Love (2001),where she challenges conventional definitions of familial affection—it looks like she and her parents are kissing—as well as the dynamics of reproduction, as they all play an equal part in “birthing” the onion from their mouths, instead of the mother and father “producing” a child. In these videos, Chang symbolically relinquishes part of herself into inanimate objects, only to devour them, literally or metaphorically, much like the mythical symbol of the ouroboros, a snake or dragon that consumes its own tail, symbolizing eternity or endless cycles of change. Through these actions, Chang reclaims conceptions of the self—such as vanity or narcissism—on her own terms, in a repudiation of the patriarchal subjugation of women’s bodies.

Fountain,1999, Still from SD video: 6min

These notions of self-consumption and wholeness are most clearly embodied in Fountain, first performed in 1999 at Jack Tilton gallery in New York. For this work, Chang installed a large round mirror on the floor of the space and covered it with water. Wearing a nondescript gray suit, she knelt and slurped the liquid from the mirror, appearing to engage in long, repeated kisses with her reflection for 35 to 40 minutes. These actions recall Jacques Lacan’s conception of the “mirror stage,” in which young toddlers see themselves in a reflection either real or socially engendered, triggering a lifelong conflict between the fragmented infantile consciousness and vulnerable body, and a newly presented, unified physical image. Responding to the idea of the racialized Asian- American woman, often viewed by society via her fractured—and, as cultural theorist Anne Anlin Cheng might say, “ornamented”— parts, Chang moves her face toward and away from the silvered surface, fragmenting and unifying her image repeatedly, and revealing a self that is fluid, moving and capable of being reconstituted back into the body, which she does so with noisy, delirious gusto.

Chang’s extreme performances tested the politics and trauma of her Asian, female experience, and she often pushed herself beyond normal physical and psychological limits. Shaved (1998) consists of five minutes of tense action as the artist attempts to shave her pubic hair blindfolded, the blade at times hovering perilously close to her genitalia. In the oddly erotic video- performance (Untitled) Eels (2001), she slips live wriggling fish into her button-down blouse, squirming uncontrollably as she struggles to contain her own disgust and the unpredictable thrashing of the creatures inside of her shirt. The “Stage Fright” series (2002–04) depicts Chang feasting on takeout food while sitting on a toilet. She then purges her stomach’s contents immediately after, and repeats the actions over the course of an hour. Later, she recalled that with these works, as with Fountain, she “would get out-of-body experiences. Because I was just in one place for so long. I did [Fountain] for an extended period and almost died from drinking so much water. I had no idea. I was an idiot. When I did Eels for the first time, time slowed down because I have a fear of snake-like animals. I had no idea how much time had passed. Looking back on it now, it seems like a traumatic experience.”

(UNTITLED) EELS, 2001, stills from SD video: 17 min.

Gradually, over the course of the 2000s, Chang began “stepping outside of the frame of performance” and shifted her ideas around identity related to the human body onto other “bodies”—of landscapes, cinema or otherwise. In the photograph and video series “Contortion” (2000–02), Chang playfully symbolized this detachment—from self as subject to self as auteur—by recording herself from the waist up and another faceless woman from the waist down, arranging the two as a single body. In a vaguely odalisque pose and wearing a scarlet-and-gold outfit, she confronts the paradox of the hypersexual yet demure Asian female. As Oishi writes: “Bad Asians,” such as Chang, “ find their voices through a perverse identification and relationship with popular culture that uncovers, tweaks and plays with the radicalized fantasies, fears and representations that make culture popular.” Here, Chang plays gleefully with those fantasies; she smirks, as if to taunt the viewer who tried, and failed, to objectify her body for their own pleasure.

CONTORTION, 2001, stills from video: 2 min.

In his book Learning to Die in the Anthropocene (2015), based on a 2013 essay first published in the New York Times, writer Roy Scranton urges that we must accept the inevitability of human extinction—and that we are beyond the point at which it was possible to create a viable future for the planet. He writes: “The greatest challenge we face is a philosophical one: understanding that this civilization is already dead. The sooner we confront our situation and realize that there is nothing we can do to save ourselves, the sooner we can get down to the difficult task of adapting, with mortal humility, to our new reality.” Scranton’s warning gave Chang insight into the malaise that she had been experiencing, which had colored recent projects, in particular Shangri-La and Flotsam Jetsam: “There was [already] a certain level of mourning in these works. I was already thinking about how the environment puts pressure on the body.” These ideas coalesced in the ambitious and wide-ranging The Wandering Lake (2009–17), which, in looking at grief around humanity’s potential extinction in the harsh light of day, triggered a profound metamorphosis in Chang’s practice and outlook on life.

Flotsam Jetsam, 2007

Hua Building Shot and Reverse, 2007, 40 x 50in, digital c-print

(collaboration with David Kelley)

single channel video installation, 30 minutes

The Wandering Lake is, superficially, about civilization’s role in environmental loss, in particular the disappearance of water. Over a period of eight years, Chang embarked on several expeditions across China, Uzbekistan and Fogo Island in Newfoundland, initially inspired by Swedish explorer Sven Hedin (1865–1952), who published important reports on water migration in Central Asia. She first went in search of Xinjiang’s Lop Nur and Uzbekistan’s Aral Sea, endorheic lakes that dried up due to human intervention— dams, in the case of Lop Nur, and, for the Aral Sea, an irrigation plan executed by the Soviet government to hydrate surrounding deserts. She then traced the history of the Atlantic cod fish—which in 1992 was declared an endangered species due to decades of aggressive over shing—back to Canada’s Fogo Island, which since the 15th century has been a prime commercial shery for Europeans and North Americans. Most recently, in China, she charted the ducts and dams of the ongoing South-to-North Water Diversion Project, which aims to transfer 44.8 billion cubic meters of water annually from the Yangtze River to the arid, water-stressed north—an infrastructure project expected to displace hundreds of thousands of people.

Installation view of INVOCATION OF A WANDERING LAKE, PART II, 2016,

projection of single-channel video: 12 min 49 sec, dimensions variable, at “The Wandering Lake 2009–2017,” Queens Museum, New York, 2017–18.

Photo by Hai Zhang. Courtesy Queens Museum.

These intense emotions spill over into her latest project, Milk Debt (2019– ), which takes its title from the Chinese Buddhist idea that we each owe an unpayable debt—or a bond—to the parents and forebears that gave us life. For this project, much like in her earliest performances, Chang once again focuses on the possibilities of the human body, this time charting its emotional and physical register through the most nurturing, and perhaps also valuable of liquids: breast milk. Having the performer list fears crowd-collected from a specific city, she mentioned, is a way to take the temperature of that place, and to evoke the various large and small bonds that take us through life: such as between mother and child; and between the landscape—Mother Earth—and the people who govern it. Notably, the performance at Tai Kwun’s JC Cube occurred the evening before a monumental protest against a proposed extradition bill in Hong Kong, and as such, the lists, which had been collected a few weeks prior, were fraught with political fears— “anxieties that are not always so visible” all the time, Chang reminded us, yet are constantly present. On a physical level, there was also an emphasis on the Donna Haraway-esque cyborgian productions inherent in the female body, made explicit by the absence of a baby and the introductory sound of the pump mechanically sucking at the air before the performer, local schoolteacher Heather Lin, joined the machine to her body and began to speak. Currently, Chang is working on a video, with fears collected from other places and other people read out by the Los Angeles-based performing artist Kestrel Leah.

Chang frequently ruminates on her own fears, much in the way that the author Roy Scranton adheres to a recommendation found in Hagakure, an 18th-century Samurai manual: “Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily.” As part of that practice, she has begun to stitch her anxieties onto comforters as a way to reconcile with these worries, and also to utilize them in order to remain present. “DEATH / LEROY’S FUTURE DEATH / DEATH OF THE HUMAN SPECIES / DEATH OF THE EARTH,” one quilt reads, the letters loosely sewn into the bulky fabric. While the eels, eggs, vomit and urine of her earlier works are gone, one might say that her relationship with these blankets, which can smother as well as comfort, is even more unorthodox. She doesn’t just confront her own mortality so much as she snuggles with it—and isn’t that the most extreme performance of all?

- 杂志内刊 -