Patty Chang
Biography
Patty Chang was born in 1972 in San Francisco. She was described as "one of our most consistently exciting young artists" by The New York Times in 2006. Originally trained as a painter, she is primarily known for her short filmsand videos and her performance art. Her performances, recorded in short films, became notorious for testing the limits of endurance and taste. In Gong Li With the Wind (1996), performed at the New York University Film Center, she consumed and defecated a staggering quantity of beans. For Paradise (1996), an indictment of the international sex trade in Asia, she played a prostitute servicing a customer. In a series of performances titled Alter Ergo (1997), the artist balanced her body in a variety of tortuously uncomfortable poses as a critique of female passivity. Chang has had solo shows at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid (2000), Baltic Art Center in Visby, Sweden (2001), Jack Tilton Gallery in New York (1999 and 2001), Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (2005), and Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, Maine (2008), among others. She has appeared in group shows and performances such as the Performance Festival at Kunstpanorama in Lucerne (2000), Quadrennial of Contemporary Art at the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst in Ghent (2001), Mirror, Mirror on the Wall at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams (2002), Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self at the International Center of Photography in New York (2003), Still Points of the Turning World at SITE Santa Fe (2006), Family Pictures at the Guggenheim Museum in New York (2007), and New Directors/New Film Festival at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2008). She has staged solo shows in major cities such as Madrid, Visby, Sweden, and New York City (where she now lives and works)
