Patty Chang

Born 1972, San Francisco, CA Resides New York, NY

Education
B.A., University of California, San Diego;
L’Accademia di Belle Arti, Venice, Italy

Selected Awards:
Tiffany Foundation Grant; The Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art.

Selected Solo Exhibitions:
P.S. 122 and Jack Tilton/Anna Kustera Gallery, New
York; Nacional Centro de Arte, Reina Sofia, Madrid;
Galerie Gabrielle Maubrie, Paris; The Contemporary
Museum, Honolulu. Selected Group Exhibitions: The
Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; Hamburg
Kunstverein, Germany; The Sculpture Center and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; ICA, London.

Hitomi Iwasaki stated “Patty Chang performs exaltations of the extreme, crossing the realms of comedic absurdity or hysterical torture. She drools with sticky abandon– mouth cramped with candy. She slurps water off the surface of a mirror placed on a public toilet floor….She tries to sit still as live eels wiggle under her tight-fitting blouse. She stumbles over a sod-covered waterbed…. The perverse concatenation of props…environments…and gender or socially coded attires…fuses allegorical facets to outlandish acts.” Roberta Smith wrote “[Chang] combines the social role-playing side of performance art and set-up photography…with its more abstract, endurance-oriented side….To this she adds a post-feminist toughness in which different aspects of the feminine are flaunted, exaggerated or rendered almost humiliatingly vulnerable.” Margaret Sundell noted “Chang’s work is characterized by its brash confrontation of female stereotypes, its attention to the metaphoric and erotic implications of foodstuffs…and above all its insistence – borne out in the use of performance – that societal norms are not abstractions but the lived experience of the bodies they mark.”

Title: eels
Show: Involuntary Narratives / Conceptuesque