Patty Chang

Bank is pleased to present Touch Archive, an exhibition of works by Patty Chang that inaugurates the gallery's New York pilot program. Touch Archive is the New York debut of Chang's recent works, exemplifying the Los Angeles-based artist's multidisciplinary practice across performance, video, photography, and installation. Building on Chang's long history with the gallery, Touch Archive is the seventh time the artist has exhibited with the gallery since her inclusion in Bank's very first show in 2013. Concurrent with the Bank exhibition, Chang unveils a new commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie.

Touch Archive centers on Chang's video essay, We Are All Mothers (2022), comprising her reflections on Learning Endings, a larger collaborative research project between Chang, veterinary pathologist Aleksija Neimanis, and cultural theorist Astrida Neimanis. The project layers scientific, artistic, and theoretical perspectives to investigate communal mourning, the passage of intergenerational trauma, and approaches to multispecies care and repair.

We Are All Mothers emerged from pandemic-era virtual meetings where the three researchers conducted and observed harbor porpoise necropsies—dissections performed to determine the animals' cause of death. Neimanis's reports on porpoise deaths caused by bycatch, environmental pollutants, or disease form a database to prevent further species loss. As a collective, the researchers asked Neimanis to perform a ritual of touch before the necropsies, placing a comforting hand on the animal and incorporating afterlife care into her scientific protocol.Chang considers the intimacy of this gesture, positing the possibility of a "touch archive" in the body, created by memories of touch from body to body—or, in this case, from gloved hand to animal skin.

Images of the scientist's hand holding the heads, flippers, and remains of the porpoises compose a visual touch archive, an empathetic companion to the veterinary necropsy database. The images from the touch archive are reproduced in the gallery as photographic snapshots, laid out for visitors to flip over and interact with. The installation borrows the mechanics of a memory game, requiring a physical engagement with the cards and recollection of the images when hidden from sight. The exercise reproduces the rituals of the touch archive, which in turn prods the audience to form new networks of touch memories.

Alongside this tactile intimacy, We Are All Mothers meditates profoundly on fear and love, emotions Chang often revisits throughout her practice. She expands on her troubling thoughts in an earlier work, Things I'm Scared of Right Now (2018), which features a list of fears prompted by her experience of heatwaves and wildfires in Los Angeles. From "public speaking" to "Leroy's future death" to "Fire, dying in a fire," the work cultivates an empathetic space to document and purge human, motherly, and environmental anxieties, even foreshadowing the artist's displacement due to the 2025 Eaton Fire.

Patty Chang's works divulge these fearful possibilities, from the paralyzing concerns that emerge from one's transition into motherhood to the global ecological crisis and our human impact. Yet, her work also calls for new activations from unease, exploring new modes of environmental conservation, an expansive understanding of motherhood and care for other beings, and a consideration for those often unseen.

Chang’s exploration of human and environmental connection is continued in Bank’s second-floor group exhibition, Braided Stream, curated by Yuan Fuca. Like Chang, the 10 featured artists investigate the various ecological relationships arising from migration, spirituality, environmental transformation, conservation, and decay.

Patty Chang (b. 1972, San Leandro, CA) is a Los Angeles-based artist and educator. Chang received her Bachelor of Arts at the University of California, San Diego in 1994. Shortly after graduating, she moved to New York, where she emerged in the alternative performance scene, re-examining the critical parameters of body politics and identity construction with challenging performances, photographs, and short films.

Chang’s legendary early works include Melons (At A Loss) (1998), where she often used food, clothing, and her own body to test the limits of physical endurance, taste, and gender stereotypes. New York Times critic Roberta Smith lauded Chang’s early works for their “post-feminist toughness in which different aspects of the feminine are flaunted, exaggerated or rendered almost humiliatingly vulnerable.” Chang’s seminal works, including Melons (At A Loss) and In Love (2001) were recently featured as E-flux’s Staff Picks for March 2025.

Since the 1990s, Chang’s prolific multimedia practice has covered critical issues of racial identity, psychogeography, communal grief, large-scale infrastructure, and impacted subjectivities. Her work Shangri-La (2005) conflates the delicate boundary between reality and myth as she traveled to central China, seeking the real-world inspiration for the Western-invented paradise of Shangri-La. Chang’s recent projects include The Wandering Lake (2009-2017), an expansive, multi-year project investigating landscapes shaped by mass human-engineered water structures, which was exhibited as a solo project at the Queens Museum (2017), and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2019). Her most recent collaboration, Learning Endings (2022-ongoing), is an interdisciplinary research project that surfaced amidst the growing climate crisis, threats to ocean ecosystems, and challenges to scientific expertise. Learning Endings acknowledges and examines veterinary necropsies of dead marine mammals as a form of environmental care.

Chang’s work has been exhibited internationally at institutions such 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; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Times Museum, Guangzhou, China; and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden. She has received a United States Artist Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Grant, a Creative Capital Fellowship, 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. Her project Learning Endings is supported in part by The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Art & The Environment Arts Commission.

Chang’s work is featured prominently in prestigious collections worldwide including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Guggenheim, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; New Museum, New York; M+, Hong Kong; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; White Rabbit, Sydney; Kadist Foundation, Paris, France; Sammlung Julia Stoschek, Berlin, Germany; Perez Art Museum, Miami; and Macallin Art Foundation, Beijing, China.