In celebration of AAPI Heritage Month and Mother's Day, this FOCUS newsletter features Scratching at the Moon artist Patty Chang whose work grapples with the messy and often contradictory subjects of shame, humor, empathy, abjection, taste, disgust, and longing. On view at ICA LA as part of the exhibition is Chang’s We Are All Mothers (2022). Part video essay, part memory game, the work reflects on a porpoise necropsy performed by wildlife pathologist Aleksija Neimanis, observed and recorded by Chang and feminist ecological scholar Astrida Neimanis as part of their collaborative research project, Learning Endings (2021–ongoing). Throughout, the artist’s voice, quiet and contemplative, interrupts the clinical nature of the procedure to consider the meaning behind it all. Chang observes, “When she cuts open the forestomach, then the stomach, she finds breast milk…I sit up, straighten-this has woken me up. I didn’t imagine breastmilk in a stomach…I am fixated on how I didn’t realize it could drink milk.” Chang continues, musing aloud on motherhood, our impact upon one another, and on the interrelationship between humans, animals, and the environment-where does one end and the other begin? As evidenced by We Are All Mothers and the works that came before it elaborated on in this newsletter, Chang’s practice plunges headlong into explorations of love and suffering, the self and the other.

Explore the Exhibition

ARTIST BIO

Patty Chang emerged as an artist from the alternative art scene of mid-1990s New York, producing works that were unabashedly dealing with the subjects of gender, language, and empathy. Throughout her career, Chang has challenged the parameters of performance and its power as a storytelling vehicle. In particular, performance as a medium has allowed Chang to explore what Cathy Park Hong and Sianne Ngai have characterized as "minor feelings" or "ugly feelings"-emotions that are not easily named or characterized and that resist cathartic release. For example, one of the artist’s most iconic video works, In Love (2001), features Chang eating an onion with her parents, its footage reversed so that it shows child and parent kissing, then crying, then regurgitating the onion together. From such early works to the artist’s more recent experimental films and lecture-performances, Chang uses her own body to address the issues of everyday life-with all their leaks and spills-from processing, purging, and nurturing, to mutual dependence and independence.

DIVING DEEPER
Learning Endings

"Every year, hundreds of whales and other marine mammals strand on terrestrial shores. These ocean-dwelling animals are mostly hidden from humans during their lifetimes, but in a stranding death, they reveal themselves to us, and call on us to care. What might this care look like? What can these deaths teach us about the lives of these animals, and about the entangled futures of humans and oceans? 

Learning Endings is a multi-part interdisciplinary research project led by artist Patty Chang, veterinary pathologist and researcher Aleksija Neimanis, and feminist cultural theorist Astrida Neimanis that has surfaced amidst the overlapping contexts of climate crisis, threatened ocean ecosystems, and challenges to scientific expertise. It examines the work of scientists who perform necropsies of dead marine mammals as unacknowledged forms of attention and care, and explores how various kinds of art practice can support this care work. Including laboratory observation, expert interviews, walking art, filmmaking, community engagement, poetics, public outreach, and the sweaty work of interpersonal and interdisciplinary exchange, Learning Endings seeks different kinds of conversation about science, oceans, and human responsibility. As we try to figure out how to respond to so many untimely endings, how might we reconfigure the role of both science and art as part of the complicated ecologies of mutual care in and for the oceans, and for the beings that call it home?"

Excerpted from the Learning Endings website, learn more here.

LOOKING BACK
Patty Chang: The Wandering Lake, 2009–2017
at ICA LA (March 17 – August 4, 2019)

Patty Chang’s The Wandering Lake, 2009-2017 was an eight-year project that sought to redefine the role of artist, image, object, and performance. Integrating the mediums of video projection, photography, sculpture, publication, and performance, the exhibition of this ambitious project was first organized by the Queens Museum and then it traveled to ICA LA in 2019. In the presentation, visitors were invited to navigate through Chang’s personal, associative, and narrative meditations on mourning, caregiving, geopolitics, and landscape. The installation itself was structured to replicate the complex way in which stories develop through geography, history, cultural mythology, fiction, and personal experience. While Chang’s multi-year project was in part inspired by turn-of-the-century colonial explorer Sven Hedin’s book The Wandering Lake (1938)-which tells the story of a migrating body of water in the Chinese desert-the project also chronicled the loss of Chang’s father as well as her pregnancy and the birth of her son. Experience a video walkthrough of the exhibition with the artist here.

Revisit the Exhibition

MORE TO WATCH

The Lonely Palette, Episode 46
on Patty Chang's Melons (At A Loss) (1998)
In this 2023 episode of The Lonely Palette podcast, host Tamar Avishai discusses Chang's 1998 work Melons (At A Loss) and the ways in which breastmilk, breast feeding, motherhood, and the female body are viewed and understood in society. 

"In Love" With Patty Chang (2006)
This short documentary by Short Sterile Cowboys & Co. follows Chang as she discusses multiple past video works including Losing Ground (2000), Melons (At A Loss) (1998), In Love (2001), Contortion (2001), and Untitled (Eels) (2001). 

Milk Debt (excerpt) (2018–ongoing)
Milk Debt is a multi-channel video project that began in 2018 and features a seemingly endless script of fears that were gathered from open calls in Hong Kong and the United States, read by women pumping their breast milk. The work's title came from a tenet in Chinese Buddhism, which states payments must be made toward a mother's afterlife for the years of breast milk made from the woman's body. 

Artist Talk: Patty Chang
In this virtual talk organized by the Hammer Museum, Patty Chang walks viewers through her book, The Wandering Lake (see details below), which accompanied the exhibition of the project presented at ICA LA in 2019. During the lecture, Chang shares clips from the video works within the installation as well as research and ephemera from the making of the work.

Artist Talk: Conversation with Patty Chang and curators Anuradha Vikram and Asha Bukojemsky
In conjunction with 18th Street Arts Center's presentation of Milk Debt in 2020, Chang talks with curators Anuradha Vikram and Asha Bukojemsky about the artwork, what it means to "pump and dump," and ideas of motherhood, fear, and anxiety.

ICA LA SHOP

Patty Chang: The Wandering Lake
Edited by Karen Kelly and Barbara Schroeder
 

Integrating video projection, photography, sculpture, publication and performance into one expansive body of work, Los Angeles-based Patty Chang examines the complex way stories develop through geography, history, cultural mythology, fiction and personal experience.

Accompanying her exhibition of the multi-year project The Wandering Lake, 2009–2017 at the Queens Museum and later at ICA LA, the book combines Chang’s writings and travel photographs with historic and theoretical text excerpts, as well as photographs of her sculptures and watercolors in a personal, associative, narrative meditation on mourning, caregiving and landscape.

Scratching at the Moon

Accompanying Scratching at the Moon at ICA LA is a fully illustrated scholarly exhibition catalogue featuring a curatorial essay co-written by the exhibition’s curators Anna Sew Hoy and Anne Ellegood, an excerpt from a text by acclaimed writer and scholar Julietta Singh, and commissioned essays by curator and writer John Tain, curator Kris Kuramitsu, and writer and editor Sarah Wang. Together, these three essays chart the artists, attitudes, cultural spaces, and exhibitions that have defined the Asian American arts networks of Los Angeles since the early aughts. Additionally, the catalogue features generous artist portfolios with images and information selected by the artists, accompanied by texts on each artist’s work written by Ellegood, Curatorial Associate Caroline Ellen Liou, and Senior Curator Amanda Sroka.

Visit the ICA LA Shop