Patty Chang: surfacing

The Anderson Collection at Stanford University presents Patty Chang: surfacing, the first solo artist exhibition commission for Stanford’s Asian American Art Initiative (AAAI). The presentation is a culmination of the artist’s yearlong residency through Stanford’s Denning Visiting Artist Program. Through a critical encounter with the scientific enterprise of survey and collection, the exhibition surfaces the mysterious intimacies, forgotten collaborators, and unrecorded histories that haunt the Pacific and its coast.

The exhibition presents eleven new works by Chang, including sculptures, photographs, videos, and archival displays. To create these works, Chang utilized archaeological remains from the Point Alones Chinese fishing village on the Monterey Peninsula (now the site of Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station), fish specimens from Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, and porcelain massage tables originally commissioned for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2025 exhibition Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie.

At Stanford, the massage tables are draped in dried squid, referencing the squid fishers at the Point Alones Chinese fishing village. In 1906, the village burned, displacing 200 residents. Although the cause of fire was never officially determined, arson was an established tactic for displacing Chinese communities across the West Coast. Within a decade, the village was replaced by Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station. 

Chang’s haunting sculptures tie this history to the 2021 Atlanta Spa Shootings, tracing lineages of racialized and gendered violence, invisible labor, and reviled bodies across space and time. The exhibition also includes hagfish specimens, which became the uncredited foundation for an important early study of evolutionary biology, collected in 1897 by Point Alones resident Quock Tuck Lee, who resisted the village’s displacement. This story is told through a video of descendants of Point Alones residents visiting the site of the village, and reenacting their ancestors’ labor.

Another sculpture weaves together reclaimed archaeological sherds from Point Alones with chains. The sherds were recovered from the beach near the present-day Monterey Bay Aquarium, where they washed up after being destroyed in the 1906 fire. The curtain-like structure transforms fragments of Chinese diasporic history into a haunting threshold.

Patty Chang: surfacing is a project of grief, memorial, rage, and disobedience—an invitation to think with the deep, and to watch for what begins to rise.

The presentation is 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.

About Patty Chang
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.