Patty Chang - The Wandering Lake

Integrating video projection, photography, sculpture, publication and performance into one expansive body of work, Los Angeles-based Patty Chang (born 1972) examines the complex way stories develop through geography, history, cultural mythology, fiction and personal experience.

Accompanying her exhibition of the multiyear project A Wandering Lake at the Queens Museum that was in part inspired by turn-of-the-century colonial explorer Sven Hedin’s book Wandering Lake (1938)–which tells the story of a migrating body of water in the Chinese desert–this book alludes to the loss of Chang’s father, as well as her pregnancy and the birth of her son. The artist’s book, combining Chang’s writings and travel photographs with historic and theoretical text excerpts as well as photographs of her sculptures and watercolors, is a personal, associative, narrative meditation on mourning, caregiving and landscape.