Patty Chang (born February 3, 1972 in

San Leandro, California San Leandro (Spanish for " St. Leander") is a city in Alameda County, California, United States. It is located in the East Bay of the San Francisco Bay Area; between Oakland to the northwest, and Ashland, Castro Valley, and Hayward to the sou ...

)"About." ''Patty Chang.'' Accessed March 10, 2018. http://www.pattychang.com/about/ is an American performance artist and film director living and working in Los Angeles, California. Originally trained as a painter, Chang received her

Bachelor of Arts Bachelor of arts (BA or AB; from the Latin ', ', or ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate program in the arts, or, in some cases, other disciplines. A Bachelor of Arts degree course is generally completed in three or four years ...

at the

University of California, San Diego The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego or colloquially, UCSD) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in San Diego, California. Established in 1960 near the pre-existing Scripps Insti ...

. It wasn't until she moved to New York that she became involved with the performance art scene. She has staged solo shows in major cities, including ''Patty Chang'' at Jack Tilton Gallery, New York (1999), ''Ven conmigo, nada contigo. Fuente. Melones. Afeitada.'' at Museo National de Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain (2000), ''Patty Chang: Shangri-La'' at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the New Museum, New York (2005), ''Flotsam Jetsam'' with longtime collaborator David Kelley at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2014), and her most extensive exhibition to date, ''Patty Chang: The Wandering Lake, 2009-2017,'' at the Queens Museum, Queens, NY (2017–18). Her show ''The Wandering Lake'' will also show in Los Angeles. Currently, Chang is showing at the

Museum of Fine Arts in Boston The Museum of Fine Arts (often abbreviated as MFA Boston or MFA) is an art museum in Boston, Massachusetts. It is the 20th-largest art museum in the world, measured by public gallery area. It contains 8,161 paintings and more than 450,000 works ...

where she is a part of ''Read My Lips'' that will be up until May 2020.

Education, teaching, and awards

Chang received a Bachelor of Arts at the

in 1994, and studied abroad at L’Accademia Di Belle Arti in Venice, Italy, in 1993."Collection Online: Patty Chang." ''Guggenheim'' online. Accessed March 10, 2018. https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/Patty-Chang She has held teaching positions at the

Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture is an artists residency located in Madison, Maine, just outside of Skowhegan. Every year, the program accepts online applications from emerging artists from November through January, and selects 65 t ...

Skowhegan, Maine Skowhegan () is the county seat of Somerset County, Maine. As of the 2020 census, the town population was 8,620. Every August, Skowhegan hosts the annual Skowhegan State Fair, the oldest continuously-held state fair in the United States. Skowh ...

, and her work has been recognized by many cultural organizations, including a 2003

Rockefeller Foundation The Rockefeller Foundation is an American private foundation and philanthropic medical research and arts funding organization based at 420 Fifth Avenue, New York City. The second-oldest major philanthropic institution in America, after the Carneg ...

Award. She was a 2008 finalist for the

Hugo Boss Prize The Hugo Boss Prize was an award given every other year to an artist (or group of artists) working in any medium, anywhere in the world. Upon its establishment in 1996, it distinguished itself from other art awards because it has no restrictions on ...

and a Guna S. Mundheim Fellow in the Visual Arts at the

American Academy in Berlin The American Academy in Berlin is a private, independent, nonpartisan research and cultural institution in Berlin dedicated to sustaining and enhancing the long-term intellectual, cultural, and political ties between the United States and Germany ...

in Germany for fall 2008. In 2012, she received the

Creative Capital Creative Capital is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization based in New York City that supports artists across the United States through funding, counsel, gatherings, and career development services. Since its founding in 1999, Creative Capital has commi ...

Award in Visual Arts, and in 2014, she was a

John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation was founded in 1925 by Olga and Simon Guggenheim in memory of their son, who died on April 26, 1922. The organization awards Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been ...

Guggenheim Fellow in Creative Arts—Fine Arts.

Work

Her performative works deal with themes of

gender Gender is the range of characteristics pertaining to femininity and masculinity and differentiating between them. Depending on the context, this may include sex-based social structures (i.e. gender roles) and gender identity. Most cultures u ...

, language and

empathy Empathy is the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within their frame of reference, that is, the capacity to place oneself in another's position. Definitions of empathy encompass a broad range of social, co ...

, and she was described as "one of our most consistently exciting young artists" by ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'' in 2005. Originally trained as a

painter Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface (called the "matrix" or "support"). The medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush, but other implements, such as knives, sponges, and ai ...

, she is primarily known for her

short film A short film is any motion picture that is short enough in running time not to be considered a feature film. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences defines a short film as "an original motion picture that has a running time of 40 minutes ...

s, videos and

performance art Performance art is an artwork or art exhibition created through actions executed by the artist or other participants. It may be witnessed live or through documentation, spontaneously developed or written, and is traditionally presented to a pu ...

. Chang has participated in film as body dubbing which allows studios to remake films with more international casts. She often plays a central role in her own work, often seen as testing the acceptable boundaries of taste and endurance. Some of her work contains

scatological In medicine and biology, scatology or coprology is the study of feces. Scatological studies allow one to determine a wide range of biological information about a creature, including its diet (and thus where it has been), health and diseases su ...

elements, while others critique perceptions of female sexual roles. She 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” in her 2005 exhibition ''Shangri-La'' based on a fictional location in the 1933 novel

Lost Horizon ''Lost Horizon'' is a 1933 novel by English writer James Hilton. The book was turned into a film, also called ''Lost Horizon'', in 1937 by director Frank Capra. It is best remembered as the origin of Shangri-La, a fictional utopian lamaser ...

by James Hilton. Her recent work, especially "Invocation for The Wandering Lake" (2015–16), draws connections between landscape and the body.Wang, Xueli. "Patty Chang." ''Art in America'' online. Accessed March 10, 2018. https://www.artinamericamagazine.com/reviews/patty-chang-2/ Many aspects of Chang's work connect back to her Asian culture such as her interest in

Shangri-La Shangri-La is a fictional place in Asia's Kunlun Mountains (昆仑山), Uses the spelling 'Kuen-Lun'. described in the 1933 novel ''Lost Horizon'' by English author James Hilton. Hilton portrays Shangri-La as a mystical, harmonious valley, ge ...

as well as her criticism of Asian female stereotypes in her work ''Contortion'' (2000).

Filmography

References

External links

Official website

UCLA exhibition

{{DEFAULTSORT:Chang, Patty 1972 births Living people American people of Chinese descent Educators from California American women educators Artists from San Francisco Film directors from San Francisco 21st-century American women