BANK is pleased to announce that Patty Chang’s Invocation for a Wandering Lake, Part 1 & 2 has been acquired by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, for its permanent collection. The Whitney Museum of American Art is renowned for its comprehensive collection of twentieth- and twenty-first-century American art, comprising more than 25,000 works by over 3,500 artists.
Created between 2015 and 2016, the two-channel video installation is among the most representative works from Chang‘s eight-year project The Wandering Lake (2009–2017). In Part I, the artist is seen at the coastline of Fogo Island, Newfoundland, washing the carcass of a beached sperm whale with a sponge and bucket of water. In Part II, she wades into the shoreline of the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan, scrubbing the rusted hull of an abandoned boat stranded on the dried seabed. Through these slow, repetitive gestures of care, Chang responds to disappearing bodies of water, displaced communities, and forgotten histories — what one critic described as a ritual of restoration that is both tender and futile.
The work stems from Chang’s engagement with Swedish explorer Sven Hedin‘s 1938 book The Wandering Lake, which recounts his search for a migrating body of water in the Central Asian desert. Rather than attempting to map the lake’s movement, Chang turns toward what its disappearance leaves behind, and how the loss of water reshapes land, body, and memory. As ArtReview noted in 2018, Chang uses “the movements, strains and tenderness of her own body to insist that we also consider the individual body when examining the past, present and future implications of the events that displace entire peoples.” Patty Chang’s solo exhibition The Wandering Lake, 2009–2017 at the Queens Museum was reviewed by The New York Times, which wrote: “The show touches on ... more global losses — of languages, cultures and even the geographical features that shape them. A running theme, sometimes elusive but potent nonetheless, is material and psychological instability, and meaning that spills the boundaries of individual works.”
The work has been presented at major institutions and international exhibitions, including the 11th Shanghai Biennale (2016), the Queens Museum, New York (2017–2018), where it anchored her solo exhibition Patty Chang: The Wandering Lake, 2009–2017; her solo exhibition Re-Configurations at BANK, Shanghai (2017), her first solo presentation in China; and her solo at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2019).
