BANK is happy to announce that our artist Patty Chang participates in the first show of 2019 HOT BLOOD in White Rabbit Gallery, Sydney, Australia. HOT BLOOD introduces 23 artists who are not afraid to take risks. Playful, irreverent – and sometimes downright subversive – they explore subjects ranging from sexual desire and bodily frailty to spiritual ecstasy and traumatic memory.
Performance artist Patty Chang’s work Configurations traverses China from south to north, following the route of the South-North Water Diversion Project, an engineering marvel and the largest water diversion in history. Chang, whose work has always confronted taboos and stereotypes, decided that each time she found a new section of the aqueduct she would collect her urine in home-made ‘female urinary devices’, evidence of the physicality of her journeying.
HOT BLOOD presents an exciting line-up of artists who belong to what critic Barbara Pollack calls the ‘post-passport generation’: they engage with global art discourses, adapt new and emergent technologies and confound old-fashioned expectations about what Chinese art looks like. Since Chinese contemporary art exploded onto the international art scene in the 1990s, dramatic changes in Chinese society have, in turn, changed the nature of its art. The artists in HOT BLOOD reflect on their Chinese society – and on ours. As histories are dismantled, revised, reinterpreted (or erased) and renewed, questions of identity and meaning become increasingly urgent.
