Untitled, 2026, cyanotype, © Patty Chang

In surfacing, Patty Chang engages the ocean as a physical, geopolitical, and symbolic space, inviting you to consider the work of collection and recollection. Chang’s multimedia sculptural practice brings together archaeological remains from Point Alones Chinese Fishing Village (now the site of Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station), fish specimens from Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, and archival materials documenting the lives of Chinese fisher families on the Monterey Peninsula.  In a critical encounter with the scientific enterprise of survey and collection, Chang surfaces the mysterious intimacies, forgotten collaborators, and unrecorded histories that haunt the Pacific and its coast.

Patty Chang: surfacing culminates a year-long residency through the Denning Visiting Artist program, during which Chang was embedded at Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station. The exhibition’s central sculptural work is a porcelain massage table that was originally commissioned for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie and now travels to Stanford to take new form as a surface upon which to dry squid. This act of transmutation connects histories of the ocean, labor, and racial and gendered violence: the transpacific migration of porcelain and people; the scientific collection of marine specimens; the labor of fishing and drying squid; and the 2021 Atlanta Spa Shootings.  It is a project of grief, memorial, rage, and disobediance—an invitation to think with the deep, and to watch for what begins to rise.

Patty Chang: surfacing is the first solo artist commission by Stanford’s Asian American Art Initiative.  It is organized by the Anderson Collection at Stanford University and co-curated by Kelsey Chen, interdisciplinary theorist, artist, PhD Candidate in Modern Thought & Literature, and Marci Kwon, Associate Professor of Art & Art History and Marta Sutton Weeks Faculty Scholar in the Humanities.  The exhibition is made possible with support from the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Global, a Humanities Seed Grant from Stanford Public Humanities, the Stanford Arts Roberta Bowman Denning Visiting Artist Fund, and generous support for programs and operations from William Reller & Kristin E. Klint, Anderson Student Engagement Fund, and museum members. We extend special thanks to the staff of Hopkins Marine Station, Quock Mui Foundation, and the Point Alones Chinese Fishing Village descendant community.