Patty Chang

Patty Chang (born February 3, 1972, in San Francisco, California) is an American film director and performance artist living in New York. Her performative works deal with themes of gender, language and empathy. She was described as "one of our most consistently exciting young artists" by The New York Times in 2006. Originally trained as a painter, she is primarily known for her short films and videos and her performance art. She often plays a central role in her own work (to the point that a New York Times critic once described it as "hair-raisingly narcissistic"), which is often seen as testing the acceptable boundaries of taste and endurance. Some of her work contains scatological elements (such as Gong Li With The Wind, a short film), and others critique perceptions of female sexual roles (For Paradise, also a short film).
She denounces the problems that she observes in the contemporary society by staging her own body in intensely difficult situations. And documents her actions and extends her practice by using video and photography.
She has staged solo shows in major cities such as Madrid at the Museo National de Reina Sofia in 2000, in Visby at the Baltic Art Center in 2001, in Los Angeles at the Hammer Museum in 2005, in New York at the Jack Tilton Gallery in 1999 and at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in 2005.

Chang attended University of California, San Diego and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1994. She taught at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine. Her work has been recognized by many cultural organizations, including a 2003 award from the Rockefeller Foundation. She was a 2008 finalist for the Hugo Boss Prize and a Guna S. Mundheim Fellow in the Visual Arts at the American Academy in Berlin in Germany, for Fall 2008. She received the Creative Capital Award in 2012 for the discipline of Visual Arts. In 2014, she was a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Guggenheim Fellow in Creative Arts-Fine Arts.