21 October – 23 December 2005
Chinese Arts Centre presents Patty Chang’s first major solo exhibition in the UK. It features a newly commissioned video installation alongside significant past projects in which the body acts as a conduit for transformation and communication.
Patty Chang’s new work, Garden (2005), takes as its departure point the prevalent theme in pre-modern Chinese literature of longing for home and returning to one’s garden after times of chaos, and in old age.
Taking her father, an immigrant to the US, as the subject the piece looks at the notion of gardening as a meditative process of transposing memory and personal history into the physical landscape of his garden.
Nested within the projection of her father’s tourist footage of China is the artist’s footage of her father in his garden. Both are informed by the desire to connect with and relate to what they imagine is there.
Simultaneously uneasy and moving, In Love (2001) features the artist in a tenuous embrace with her parents. It investigates the complex relationship between love, desire, and the bonds and limitations of communicating through the body. As the video continues in becomes apparent that the video is running in reverse time, and they are in fact in sharing an onion not a kiss. By the end of the piece, the onion is reconstituted and the tears have disappeared, wholeness is restored.
Melons (At a Loss) (1998) juxtaposes the verbal narrative of a death ritual with the visually distressing act of cutting off one’s own breast. Made to fill in the lack of emotional memory of her aunt’s death from breast cancer, the verbal narrative vies for attention with the visually shocking act of cutting off the melon breast.
Patty Chang was born in San Francisco and currently lives in New York. Her work has been exhibited extensively in the USA and internationally, including Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles and the Guggenheim Museum, New York.
List of works:
Melons (At a Loss), 1998, DVD, running time 3mins 44sec
In Love, 2001, Two-channel DVD, running time 3mins 28sec
Garden, 2005, Video Installation, DVD, running time 25mins
Biography:
Patty Chang was born in San Francisco and currently lives in New York.
She has exhibited extensively on the international art circuit. Solo exhibitions have taken place at Museo Nacional Centre de Arte, Madrid (2000), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2000), Kustera Tilton Gallery, New York (2005).
She is also part of the Three M Project touring to UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, The New Museum, New York and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Patty Chang’s work was shown in the Guggenheim’s, Moving Pictures (2002).
Her work has been collected by the Guggenheim, New York, Denver Art Museum and Fonds Regional d’Art Contemporain de Lorraine, France.
