Patty Chang, Invocation for a Wandering Lake, Part I, 2015. Video still. One of two-channel projection on custom cardboard panels, color, sound, 12:49 min. Courtesy of the artist and BANK/MABSOCIETY, Shanghai.

We’ll begin where she begins, with the whale. At the Institute for Contemporary Art Los Angeles (ICA LA), Patty Chang: The Wandering Lake 2009–2017 opened with a video, Invocation for a Wandering Lake, Part I (2015), filmed on Fogo Island, near Newfoundland, Canada. A dead sperm whale had washed up on the beach while she was there. On an overcast day, she walked into the water to clean the whale as an act of mourning.

Chang is tiny next to the whale; her attempts to wash its enormous body, half-submerged in water, with more ocean water at first seem too precious, but as I continued to watch, the physical struggle forced out meaning. Both the sky and water are cold gray and spending any amount of time in the ocean must have been a physical feat in itself. The difficulty of her small body making an offering to such an enormous one is at once both moving and transgressive, an attempt to breach the boundaries of species and death. In extending herself as far and as much as she can to the whale, alone in the water, Chang makes an attempt to atone for other, more destructive acts of the human race.

In watching, even years after the act itself and far from the island, the specter of smell was inescapable given the whale’s obviously decomposing state and the artist’s close interaction with it. The corpse is discolored, perhaps already rotting. The head is caught in rocks, leaving the tail to drift freely with the movement of the waves without dislodging.

In the first place, filth is not a quality in itself, but it applies only to what relates to a boundary and, more particularly, represents the object jettisoned out of that boundary, its other side, a margin. Matter issuing from them [the orifices of the body] is marginal stuff of the most obvious kind. Spittle, blood, milk, urine, faeces or tears by simply issuing forth have traversed the boundary of the body. [. . .] The mistake is to treat bodily margins in isolation from all other margins.¹

Julia Kristeva defines the abject as that which is radically separate from the self and thus loathsome.² Shit, certain bodily fluids, and especially corpses force us to confront what is on the other side of living; they reveal the porosity of the boundaries of life and death, personhood and not personhood. Shit drops from the body to that other side, to the place of filth, so that the body can continue to live. A corpse is the ultimate waste. With her whale ablutions, Chang performs one means of purifying the abject, common to many cultures: the ritual of bathing the dead. This purification brings her living body into intimacy with the whale’s deceased one, and for a moment troubles the lines between individual and Other. Her act of atonement for this individual whale’s death and the environmental destruction that caused it, includes not only empathy, but also a symbolic willingness to subject her own body to the same forces of death that humanity has imposed on the whale.

Chang’s work displays a longstanding preoccupation with the boundaries and limits of the body. In the early 1990s, videos of performances created space in which to confront separation, transgression, perversion, and mutilation. In Melons (At a Loss) (1998), Chang faces the camera with a saucer balanced on her head, recounting a story about her dying aunt and an invented Chinese ritual performed on the occasion of a relative’s death. Death, and particularly familial death, is also a recurring theme in Chang’s work. Wearing a white bustier, she takes a knife and slices at her chest, cutting off part of her garment and the top of one of the two melons it holds. She reaches into the melon, which is uncomfortably flesh-colored, digs out and discards the seeds with her fingers, and then carves into it with a spoon. She continues to speak in between mouthfuls, frankly smacking her lips. The clink of the metal spoon against her teeth, the sound of chewing, and her attempts to breathe while simultaneously talking and eating, challenge the viewer with the visceral nature of life, dripping with injuries and ingestions. Finishing the melon, with a few last scraping sounds, Chang is left with a gaping wound in her “breast,” and smashes the saucer on the floor.

In Fountain (1999), a live performance that was documented and later edited into a discrete video work, Chang kneels to drink water from a mirror on the floor. Viewed from above, the image is rotated so as to appear as if she and the mirror are standing upright and vertical. Chang stares at her reflection, pursing her lips as if to kiss it, and then noisily slurps from the thin layer of water. The act of ingestion is seen elsewhere in In Love (2001) and Stage Fright #1 (2002), and points to the porosity of self.

Patty Chang, Fountain, 1999. Video still. Video, 5:30 min. Courtesy of the artist.

Astrida Neimanis has written extensively on the radical possibilities of water within feminist materialist philosophy. For Neimanis, “hydrologic”³ is a radical proposition through which we can consider embodiment, and trans-corporeality through a feminist, decolonial, intersectional lens with “water as body; water as communicator between bodies; water as facilitating bodies into being.”⁴ In acknowledging that we are bodies of water interdependent with other bodies of water, Neimanis hopes to usher in more thoughtful stewardship of our “hydrocommons.”⁵ Like Chang, Neimanis sketches out a trajectory between breast milk and whales—“the human infant drinks the mother, the mother ingests the reservoir, the reservoir is replenished by the storm, the storm absorbs the ocean, the ocean sustains the fish, the fish are consumed by the whale.”⁶ However, she also calls our attention to the dangers of fluidity and porosity, particularly to the vulnerable and the disenfranchised. Opening the channels between the self and Other is to invite contamination as well as hybridity, and those who are unable to control the flow of resources are most subject to toxicity and undernourishment. Building off of Adrienne Rich’s “politics of location,”⁷ Neimanis proposes a framework that moves beyond metaphors of fluidity to an embodied responsibility shaped by our diverse and particular relationships to water.⁸ A truly radical hydrologic would leverage positions of relative power to re-channel resources and structures away from those that have caused the contamination, commodification, and disappearance of our bodies of water. Though Neimanis raises the notion of responsibility, how this new hydrological ethics translates into action is left open. Chang offers this more pointed question: What are we as watery beings to do in places where water is fugitive?

Following the shift from wounded community, separation of the body from water, to potential fluidity, The Wandering Lake follows its own hydrologic. The exhibition springs from the artist’s eight-year exploration of disappearing bodies of water in China, Canada, and Uzbekistan, and the contingent losses that these disappearances have wrought. Repeatedly, bodily and personal loss parallels the disappearance of water. In each of these places, Chang attempts to grapple with the entangled consequences of human intervention on land, territory, and resources. She asks: “Art making as a grieving of living as opposed to a fight against it. Is it a sign of acceptance or giving in?”⁹ For Chang, embodied experience becomes the lens through which to examine complex and possibly intractable geopolitical issues of water and resource scarcity.

While working in Beijing in 2009, Chang became interested in traveling to the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in Western China. Xinjiang is home to the recognized Uyghur minority, who among other forms of oppression and exclusion are subject to detention in reeducation camps, often without trial or charges, for their separatist Muslim faith, wear- ing burkas, and having outspoken family members in exile abroad. Chang was loosely inspired by Sven Hedin’s 1937 book The Wandering Lake: Into the Heart of Asia, which follows the colonial Swedish explorer’s investigations of an historical lake, Lop Nur, that rapidly silted up and changed locations several times over a century. All that remains of Lop Nur now is a salt encrusted lakebed, and its closed basin has hosted a nuclear testing site and a mining operation.

In Xinjiang, where Chang is both Han Chinese and a foreigner, she enjoyed a freedom of movement beyond that of either locals or Han. While much of Chang’s early work addressed her Chinese-American female identity in a direct way, ethnicity figures differently and more subtly in the works she has created in China. In her travel diary, she makes observations on the isolation imposed on the region and some of its effects on Han and Uyghur people she encounters, interspersed with descriptions of modes of travel, sites visited, the meals she eats there and resulting issues of indigestion and diarrhea. Though the Chinese government restricted her communications and movements while she was there, she was largely able to document her experiences and above all, to leave. The video Minor (2010) was made from footage of this initial journey, during which she failed to reach Lop Nur, but travelled as close as she could to its site. In the video, she asks both a Uyghur and a Han Chinese woman to choose one word that might represent their peoples. These words are written in scarves and paper cups on the back of vehicles that then continue their travel in opposite directions down a rough dirt road. The cups and scarves fall off and untangle, rendering the words illegible as the vehicles travel further apart.

Patty Chang, Minor, 2010. Video still. Single-channel video, color, sound, 30 min. Courtesy of the artist and BANK/MABSOCIETY, Shanghai.

Chang was in Xinjiang just two months after an uprising that left many dead, and, sensitive to the risk for her collaborators and herself, has commented that she made Minor in an “oblique way so that the work isn’t directly about the political situation. I didn’t want to get anyone in trouble.”¹⁰ The video closes with Chang silently tracing the words “turbulence,” “slaughter,” and “trauma” on an airplane window. The absence of the voice due to state control runs throughout the video.

Chang’s trips to highly charged geographical regions are intertwined with events in her personal life. During her initial trip to the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan, Chang performed another ritual washing, this time of a landlocked fishing boat, which eventually became Invocation for a Wandering Lake, Part II (2016). The only water present is what Chang has brought with her in a small red bucket; the Aral Sea—once a significant inland sea and fishing port—has all but dried up due to irrigation projects diverting the water elsewhere. Chang was in the early stages of a pregnancy and, although she was not yet showing, was experiencing morning sickness, nausea, and a hypersensitivity to smells. As in Xinjiang, Chang’s bodily state and its responses to the landscapes she travels in bring her in closer connection to them—the interior state is linked to the exterior. Her physical discomforts are part of these acts, not deterrents to them.

Invocation for a Wandering Lake, Part I, Fogo Island’s dead whale, and Invocation for a Wandering Lake, Part II, Aral Sea’s landlocked boat, are sometimes shown as a diptych, and always projected onto large, incompletely unfolded panels of corrugated cardboard. At the ICA LA, they were situated adjacent to one another in a large gallery, but not side by side. The resulting zigzag formations are reminiscent of partially opened maps, a motif repeated elsewhere in the exhibition. The installation of these videos is both disrupted and precarious. Parts of the videos are obscured in the folds and crevices, and the flimsiness of the cardboard is made even more apparent by its large size. The uneven grain of the cardboard further distorts the video image, suggesting ephemerality, like that of decaying whales and rusting boats.

Patty Chang, Invocation for a Wandering Lake, Part II, 2016. One of two-channel projection on custom cardboard panels, color, sound, 12:49 min. Installation view, Patty Chang: The Wandering Lake 2009–2017, Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, March 17–August 4, 2019. Photo: Elon Schoenholz/ICA LA.

Chang returned to the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan two years later in the process of weaning her son. As she travelled to the waterline of the lake, she pumped her breast milk in cups and tins she found along the way. Uzbekistan has strict laws against photographing infrastructure, and so Letdown (Milk) (2017) consists of a series of point-and-shoot photographs of this discarded breast milk, a life-sustaining substance discarded over and over again, in lieu of images of the contested sites that Chang observed. Her photographs are conspicuously bereft of bodies—that of the child left at home for whom the milk is produced, and the wandering, productive (in both biological and capitalist terms) maternal body. In a landscape characterized by authoritarian suppression of minority perspectives, Chang’s absent bodies mirror these missing human narratives.

On another trip to China, Chang followed the South-to-North Water Diversion Project—the longest aqueduct in the world—that brings water from southern to northern China via Beijing. The aqueduct, though regarded as a necessary vehicle of development for the country, has displaced villages, farmers and other vulnerable communities in its path. Each time Chang encountered this man-made route, she marked this encounter with her own performance of masculinity by urinating using homemade devices that allowed her to pee while standing. These are made from plastic soda or water bottles, cut and taped together using various methods that can be found on the Internet. The urinary devices Chang used during her journeys have been translated into handblown borosilicate glass art objects in collaboration with fabricators at Urban Glass in Brooklyn. These prosthetic devices lend Chang a phallic capacity of extension towards the world through her internal fluids. In Configurations (2017), Chang slips the makeshift urinary devices under a short skirt or over the elastic band of shorts, and urinates with both awkwardness and bravado. Both surprising and funny, the incongruous actions of her female anatomy are reminiscent of the humor that characterized much of her earlier work, a levity that is similarly extended through the delicate glass renderings of plastic bottles held together with tape.

Patty Chang, Configurations, 2017. Video still. Three-channel video, color, sound, 13:14 min. Courtesy of the artist and BANK/MABSOCIETY, Shanghai.

Kristeva draws on the late structural anthropologist Mary Douglas’s writing on pollution, in which she asserts that, like filth and defilement, “pollution is a type of danger which is not likely to occur except where the lines of structure, cosmic or social, are clearly defined…the danger of filth represents for the subject the risk to which the very symbolic order is permanently exposed, to the extent that it is a device of discriminations, of differences.”¹¹ Unlike her other gestures that instrumentalize the potential of the abject, with these urinary devices, Chang upholds the symbolic order and creates art objects that invite both the gaze and the market. The glass devices in the exhibition no longer contain urine, and have instead been bestowed with beauty and value. Nonetheless, a collector could opt to utilize the devices for their urinary purpose, being reusable, functional, and made from a highly durable type of glass.

The urinary devices are significant because vomiting, diarrhea, urination, and other uncontrollable reactions of the body are integral to Chang’s experience of these travels and her telling of them. For Chang, the abject can serve as a light shined onto the hidden, the shameful, the dirty, or the dangerous. She crosses the boundaries of the body like she does the territory. In the police state of Uzbekistan, Chang was frequently surveilled, and her drivers and translators constantly reminded her of restrictions on what could be filmed or photographed. Images of overspilling bodily fluids served as documentation in these demarcated zones. In the exhibition, unframed photographs pinned to plywood panels depict discarded breast milk in cups and other containers, urine in bottles, and partially eaten meals. For Chang, these moments of fluidity were the only modes of expression left to her in territories where there are restrictions on more direct methods of diverting attention to the experience of the disenfranchised. Abjection becomes the vehicle for speaking about exclusion and oppression, disregarding the limits of the body and symbolic order to loop the excluded and the oppressed back in with hydrologic.

Patty Chang, Glass urinary devices, 2017. Thirty-two hand-blown borosilicate glass, plastic, tape, and cardboard sculptures with brass mounts on custom foam, plywood, and metal table, dimensions variable. Installation view, Patty Chang: The Wandering Lake 2009–2017, Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, March 17–August 4, 2019. Photo: Elon Schoenholz/ICA LA.

The Wandering Lake also takes the form of an artist’s book, which traces the project’s journey in a diaristic and discursive form. Chang brings in references from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) to the writings of Kristeva to the bestselling pregnancy guide What to Expect When You’re Expecting (1984), more broadly tracing out the lineage of the project. An unmentioned but significant precursor to Chang’s work is Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (1973–79), the landmark series in which the artist explores the complexities of boundaries in the developing relationship between herself as mother/artist and her infant child through meticulous documentation of feedings, fecal stains in diapers, speech events, and more. This earlier feminist reflection is expanded through Chang’s bodily experience of motherhood and separation, in disparate landscapes, blooming outwards towards other histories of forced sterilization and migration, sexist gynecology, environmental destruction, memory loss, and the redirection of resources. The effect of procreation on the life of a working artist is juxtaposed at once with that of governmental oppression of Uzbekistani women’s reproductive rights, and the threat to the environment through industrialized greed in China and elsewhere. In her writing on hydrologic, Neimanis establishes a genealogy of feminist writing that leads from considerations of the female body and the womb to environmental justice, which includes Luce Irigaray’s “gestational waters of the mother’s womb,” Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément on mère (mother) and mer (sea), activist Katsi Cook’s Mother’s Milk Monitoring Project, which connected industrial waste in waters to toxic breast milk, and Stacy Alaimo’s work that expands feminism’s traditional focus on human bodies to other species.¹² The Wandering Lake places Chang in this matrilineage.

Harking back to her invocation of the aunt’s death in Melons, in Que Sera, Sera (2013), Chang sings to her dying father while he remains unresponsive in bed, her voice interrupted by the bouncing and jiggling of her own body as she creates a rhythm distinct from the song’s to soothe her infant son. While mourning, despair, and anxiety are palpable throughout the exhibition, so are the processes of life. In Configurations, Chang uses yet another homemade female urinary device to pee into a plant. Waste is not only death and decay, the sloughing off of what is no longer useful, but something that can be repurposed to nourish more life. Chang continues to ingest, continues to pee, and continues to pump breast milk. Drinking and peeing, coming and going, ingesting and expelling, life and death intersect. Chang not only offers us despair, but also affective, identifying gestures and actions redolent with levity and hope.

The discursive musings in Chang’s book encourage consideration of the broader political implications of viewing geopolitical issues of water through their entanglement with the body. Chang uses her body—at once artistic, maternal, filial, female, Asian American, political—to undertake journeys to these charged zones. Beyond mere observation, she herself is observed as she ingests and metabolizes, leaving traces of the self in the places she goes. The Center for Outdoor Ethics implores us to “leave no trace,” but unlike the “neutral” anthropologist, journalist, or explorer, Chang implicates and asserts herself.

Patty Chang, Que Sera, Sera, 2013. Video still. Single-channel video, color, sound, 3:45 min. Courtesy of the artist and BANK/MABSOCIETY, Shanghai.

As Neimanis has suggested, a new ethics of hydrologic and its implications would refuse us separation from the landscapes we inhabit and the infrastructures that render them habitable, such as aqueducts and dams, but also the regimes that leverage them to impose authoritarian aims under the ruse of progress. There is an urgency in this engagement that is at once wholly personal and wholly political. In light of these strategies, it is easy to extend Chang’s engagement with water politics to the context of Los Angeles, where she now lives and works, and its river, not far from the ICA LA. In this body of water—also once migratory and unpredictable, now encased in concrete and often dry—there is a reflection of the environmental, geopolitical, and social crises upon which Chang focuses her attention. The rhetorics and trajectories of climate change, gentrification, xenophobia, displacement, and diaspora create layers of conflict interspersed with notions of progress and the responsibilities of an artist, a mother, a citizen, an institution, or a city. Transgressing the limits of the body to expand one’s circle of care and responsibility far beyond the self has never seemed more critical.

We pee, we shit, we die, but to recognize these processes as part of an entangled cycle is to disrupt their symbolic order. We can no longer feign ignorance of the nature and fate of either our wastes or our disenfranchised. What we expel into the world and its currents becomes part and parcel of what we must ingest to continue to live.

Ana Iwataki is a curator, writer, and translator from Los Angeles.