PATTY CHANG / Milk Debt

UCI Center for Medical Humanities, UCI Illuminations, Department of Asian American Studies and Department of Art Visiting Artist Lecture Series (VALS) present:

PATTY CHANG /  Milk Debt

May 7, 2021
2-3:30 PM PDT

Register HERE for the event

Milk Debt, Artist Patty Chang’s most recent work, explores the deep relationship between the body, the psyche, community and ecology. The title of the work comes from the concept in Chinese Buddhism that a child can never repay the mother for raising and feeding it with her breast milk. Developed in 2019 and 2020, Chang collected lists of fears from people in different geographical regions, which were then turned into a script and read by different lactating performers each pumping her breast milk. Although the recitations of fears are performed by the women on film, they are not originating with that person, but from greater communities, contexts, and atmospheres. These fears take many forms and register on many levels, ranging from relational insecurities and private terrors to systemic oppression and collective trauma. The project arises from the artist’s environmental anxieties, and looks to feminist strategies to reconsider the relationship between body and land. As the overarching fear of climate change bubbles up multiple concerns around global unrest, changing geographies, crumbling democracy, and the future we leave for our children, this project makes visible the internal or invisible, and explores how acts of love and empathy (like the giving of breastmilk to a child) help us think expansively and beyond ourselves. The artist writes: “I believe that the act of producing breast milk and lactation is an empathetic act. Biologically, breast milk is created when the body starts to produce the hormones of prolactin and oxytocin.  Oxytocin is a hormone that is produced when someone is in love. The act of producing breast milk allows the woman to engage in this state of being, which some might describe as being more connected, being more open and accepting, and not thinking of oneself first.”

Milk Debt can be viewed between Monday May 3, 12PM and Friday May 7, 6PM at https://vimeo.com/510469033 (password: rawmaterial)

Patty Chang is a Los Angeles based artist and educator who uses performance, video, installation and narrative forms when considering identity, gender, transnationalism, colonial legacies, the environment, large-scale infrastructural projects and impacted subjectivities. Her work has been exhibited nationwide and internationally at such institutions as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; New Museum, New York; M+ Museum, Hong Kong; BAK, Basis voor actuele Kunst, Utrecht; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester, England; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Times Museum in Guangzhou, China; and Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden. She has received a United States Artist Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Grant, a Creative Capital Fellowship, short listed for the Hugo Boss Prize, a Guna S. Mundheim Fellowship in the Visual Arts at the American Academy in Berlin, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and an Anonymous Was a Woman Grant. She teaches at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

Lecture presented in conjunction with Towards a Raw Materialism, an exhibition project organized by Simon Leung. 

https://uag.arts.uci.edu/exhibit/towards-raw-materialism