The Wandering Lake


Patty Chang

Artist Bio

The Wandering Lake is a personal, associative, narrative meditation on mourning, caregiving, geopolitics and landscape. Patty Chang is interested in looking at water resource as a political and poetical infrastructure. The project is, inspired by a turn-of-the-century colonial explorer Sven Hedin’s book Wandering Lake, in which he attempts to map location of a migrating body of water in the Chinese desert. The first trip was to Xinjiang province in Western China, a predominantly ethnic Uighar province, rich in oil where the wandering lake is located. Chang collaborated with local Uighar and Han girls on ephemeral sculptures. The second phase was a journey to Aral Sea in Uzbekistan that lost 70% of its water due to ill-planned Soviet irrigation projects. The artist traveled to the water line while pumping her breast milk along the way into empty fish cans and photographing them. In the third phase, Chang followed the longest aqueduct in the world, which brings water from southern China to the capital Beijing. She urinated every time she came upon the aqueduct, attempting to connect the aquaduct to the historic flooding of the Yellow River and Chinese imperial history, and to think about the massive infrastructure compared to the scale of the body. The Wandering Lake premiered in 2017 at the Queens Museum


Discipline
Multimedia
Award Year
2012
Status

Completed

Patty Chang

Patty Chang

Altadena, CA

Patty Chang has performed at PS122 and Exit Art and created performance videos including In Love and Untitled (Eels) with grants from the Franklin Furnace Fund, The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award and Smack Mellon Residency. Her work expanded from performance to include documenting performances and the language of documentary after receiving a Media Arts Fellowship supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and a museum commission for the 40-minute video installation Shangri-La in 2005. With the Lambent Fellowship, Chang was able to work on Gate Remains Partially Repaired about her father’s relationship to China, which led to a collaboration with David Kelley on the work Flotsam Jetsam. In 2008, she worked on The Product Love with a Guna S. Mundheim Fellowship in the Visual Arts at the American Academy in Berlin. In 2010, Chang traveled through the deserts of Xinjiang to work on Minor, which sparked her interest in The Wandering Lake project. Chang received a BFA from the University of California, San Diego.