Patty Chang, Abyssal, work in progress. Porcelain massage table covered in dried squid, 2026
Patty Chang: surfacing engages the ocean as a physical, geopolitical, and symbolic space. The exhibition culminates a year-long residency through the Denning Visiting Artist program, during which Chang was embedded at Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station. Incorporating fish specimens, archaeological remains, archival materials documenting the lives of Chinese fisher families in the early 1900s, and a porcelain table that travels from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to take new form at the Anderson, Chang’s sculptural practice surfaces the mysterious intimacies and unrecorded histories that haunt the Pacific Ocean and its coast. surfacing is the first solo artist exhibition commission for Stanford’s Asian American Art Initiative (AAAI).
About the Artist
Patty Chang is an acclaimed contemporary artist working across performance, video, installation, photography, sculpture, and narrative forms. Her practice explores connections among the body, ecology, and structures of identity, gender, nation, colonialism, and cultural inheritance.
Chang has had recent solo exhibitions and performances at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Kunstverein München, Munich; A Tale of a Tub, Rotterdam; the San José Museum of Art; Pioneer Works, Brooklyn; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Tai Kwun Centre for Heritage and Arts, Hong Kong; and the Queens Museum of Art, New York, which presented her major exhibition Patty Chang: The Wandering Lake, 2009–2017.
Her work has been included in the 11th Shanghai Biennale and the Sixth International Biennial at SITE Santa Fe, among other international exhibitions. She is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a United States Artists Fellowship, a Creative Capital grant, and an Anonymous Was a Woman award, and was shortlisted for the Guggenheim’s Hugo Boss Prize. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and M+, Hong Kong, among others.
Patty Chang lives and works in Los Angeles. She is a Professor of Art at the University of Southern California’s Roski School of Art and Design.
Acknowledgments
Patty Chang: surfacing is organized by the Anderson Collection at Stanford University in collaboration with the Asian American Art Initiative. The exhibition was curated by Kelsey Chen, interdisciplinary theorist, artist, and PhD Candidate in Modern Thought & Literature and Marci Kwon, Associate Professor, Art & Art History and Marta Sutton Weeks Faculty Scholar in the Humanities.
We gratefully acknowledge lead support from the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Global and generous support for programs and operations from William Reller & Kristin E. Klint, Anderson Student Engagement Fund, and museum members. This project is made possible through support from a Humanities Seed Grant from Stanford Public Humanities.
