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Camera Obscura 18.2 (2003) 118-129


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Interview with Patty Chang

Eve Oishi

Fountain (1999). Courtesy Patty Chang" width="72" height="54" />
Click for larger view		 Figure 1
Patty Chang, Fountain (1999). Courtesy Patty Chang

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In discussing her 1999 show, Fountain, at New York's Jack Tilton Gallery, New York artist Patty Chang cites the work of Marina Abramovic´ and Jean Cocteau as inspiration. This is a fitting way to summarize two major strains in Chang's work: the influences of early performance artists like Abramovic´ and Ana Mendieta, who use their own bodies to cross and blur the boundaries separating film, video, photography, and live performance; and that of surrealist cinema, with its ability to suture what appears to be unconnected and to split what appears to be whole.

In Fountain Chang poured water onto the surface of a round mirror lying flat on the floor and, kneeling over it, strenuously slurped the water off. This action, which was repeated for thirty to forty-five minutes at a time, was captured by a stationary video camera, and the image was projected both on a monitor outside the gallery and onto a screen behind Chang's body. The video image was tilted to make Chang's face and its reflection appear upright on the screen. The effect was a prostrate live body drinking water from the floor, while behind it, an enlarged, straining image kissed itself in a mirror. [End Page 119]

Fountain's ambiguous image of a labored, mirrored kiss reappears in her most recent video installation, In Love (2001), which was part of the recent Moving Pictures exhibit at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. In this piece, one monitor displays a close-up of Chang's face pressed against that of her mother while a second monitor pairs her with her father. The two screens document the slow and intimate process of Chang passing an onion from her mouth to her parents' mouths, slowly consuming it until it has disappeared. The footage is run backward, however, so the audience actually watches the onion being reconstructed by the tearing, kissing faces.

Chang's short films (some in collaboration with filmmaker Anie "Super-8" Stanley) have shown in underground, Asian American, super-8, lesbian and gay, and experimental film festivals throughout the world. She has created and exhibited over a dozen performance pieces, and she has moved into photography, with collaborator David Kelley, as a third medium of expression. Despite the variety of media she uses, Chang's body of work is drawn together by the bold, outrageous, and yet subtle use of her own body to test the borders of flesh and the body and to explore the physical and ideological ways in which women's bodies are stitched, clamped, hooked, squeezed, and dismantled into femininity. In one performance entitled Melons (At a Loss) (1998) Chang inserts melons into the cups of her corset. As she tells a fantastical story about inheriting a poisonous commemorative plate at the death of her aunt, she slices into one of her breasts, scoops chunks out and eats them. In another, Gong Li with the Wind (with Rajendra Roy at New York University's Cantor Film Center, 1995) she gorges on beans and shits them out from under a hoop skirt. In all of her work, the line between her own body and the props of her performance is deliberately troubled.

Much of her performance, film, and photographic work involves inanimate objects with which Chang, in her own words, "interacts passionately." The objects range from a two-hundred-pound block of ice, to a blow-up doll, to a dozen hot dogs that are crammed into her mouth, to live eels that are stuffed into her shirt (Eels, 2001). The concept of "passionate interaction" perverts [End Page 120] and troubles the lines between ecstasy and torture, and between desire and anxiety. Chang has the ability to find the exact line at which discomfort crosses over into pain—both for herself and for the audience—and to hold that line exactly one second too long.

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