Patty Chang (b. 1972, San Leandro, CA) is a Los Angeles-based artist and educator. Chang received her Bachelor of Arts at the University of Southern California, San Diego in 1994. Shortly after graduating, she moved to New York, where she emerged in the alternative performance scene, re-examining the critical parameters of body politics and identity construction with challenging performances, photographs, and short films.
Chang’s legendary early works include Melons (At A Loss) (1998), where she often used food, clothing, and her own body to test the limits of physical endurance, taste, and gender stereotypes. New York Times critic Roberta Smith lauded Chang’s early works for their “post-feminist toughness in which different aspects of the feminine are flaunted, exaggerated or rendered almost humiliatingly vulnerable.”
Since the 1990s, Chang’s prolific multimedia practice has covered critical issues of racial identity, psychogeography, communal grief, large-scale infrastructure, and impacted subjectivities. Her work Shangri-La (2005) conflates the delicate boundary between reality and myth as she traveled to central China, seeking the real-world inspiration for the Western-invented paradise of Shangri-La. Chang’s recent projects include The Wandering Lake (2009-2017), an expansive, multi-year project investigating landscapes shaped by mass human-engineered water structures, which was exhibited as a solo project at the Queens Museum (2017), and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2019). Her most recent collaboration, Learning Endings (2022-ongoing), is an interdisciplinary research project that surfaced amidst the growing climate crisis, threats to ocean ecosystems, and challenges to scientific expertise. Learning Endings acknowledges and examines veterinary necropsies of dead marine mammals as a form of environmental care.
Chang’s work has been exhibited internationally at institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; New Museum, New York; M+ Museum, Hong Kong; BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester, England; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Times Museum, Guangzhou, China; and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden. She has received a United States Artist Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Grant, a Creative Capital Fellowship, a Guna S. Mundheim Fellowship in the Visual Arts at the American Academy in Berlin, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and an Anonymous Was a Woman Grant. Her project Learning Endings is supported in part by The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Art & The Environment Arts Commission.
Chang’s work is featured prominently in several prestigious collections worldwide including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Guggenheim, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; New Museum, New York; M+, Hong Kong; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; White Rabbit, Sydney; Kadist Foundation, Paris, France; Sammlung Julia Stoschek, Berlin, Germany; Perez Art Museum, Miami; and Macallin Art Foundation, Beijing, China.