Patty Chang's work In Love (2001) was featured in the exhibition Into Me / Out of Me at MoMaPS1 in 2006.
The group exhibition is about the imagined, descriptive, and performative act of the passing into, through, and out of the human body. Spanning over 40 years and featuring an international group of more than 130 artists, the exhibition spans the frameworks of natural science, historical and mythological confrontations, ritualistic practices, and self-exploration.
The body has been a consistent concern of contemporary artists including Marina Abramovic, Chris Burden, Valie Export, Bruce Nauman, Carolee Schneemann, Kiki Smith, and Andy Warhol, all of whom are represented in the exhibition. From Hannah Wilke's unflinching self-portraits in illness and Matthew Barney's performance-based installation to Cindy Sherman's surreal photographs and Kara Walker's antebellum figures, Into Me / Out of Me examines how artists have explored the physical and psychological boundaries of their bodies and those of others creating images of fragility and strength, illness and suffering, tenderness and violence.
In the article of Into Me/Out of Me Catalog which written by Klaus Biesenbach, the first chapter: Generations of Rituals, he describes Chang as below:
"In the history of human civilization, the toothless newborn child is breastfed by its mother in the first stages of life, and at some point is provided with the wet and soft surrogate of food. The mother carefully chews the food first and then gives it to the child, from one mouth to the other. Comparative behaviorism has described this ritual as the origin of the intimate act of kissing. In her piece In Love (2001), Patty Chang exemplifies this paradigmatic gesture through an act of intergenerational intimacy. She simultaneously chews a piece of onion and passes it back and forth between her own mouth and that of her mother’s and father’s, essentially kissing both parents."
