Patty Chang @ 11th Shanghai Biennale

“The Wandering Lake is a personal, associative, narrative meditation on mourning, caregiving, geopolitics and landscape. The Wandering Lake project continues my interest in cultural imaginaries. In this work, I’ve returned to an interest in my body as performer and the embodiment of site through performance. It uses water as a medium of politics and poetics.The project is inspired by the book The Wandering Lake by Sven Hedin. At the turn of the 20th century, Swedish explorer Hedin was commissioned by the Chinese government to find a modern silk road, or a route through the deserts of western China accessible by car. Simultaneously, he documented his journey to find and map The Wandering Lake. The Wandering Lake had mysteriously disappeared from its original location and had been mismapped and lost before being found in a different place. I am interested in how when a geographical body shifts positions, it displaces and calls into question the systems and the identities built up around it. It moves me to think about how unstable landscape can mirror and rupture our sense of reality, place, and self.”