Patty Chang: surfacing | Artist Talk

Join artist Patty Chang in conversation with Marci Kwon, Associate Professor of Art & Art History and Kelsey Chen, PhD student in Modern Thought and Literature, as they discuss Patty Chang: surfacing, on view in the Wisch Family Gallery through February 8, 2027. The exhibition engages the ocean as a physical, geopolitical, and symbolic space — drawing together fish specimens from Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, archaeological remains from Point Alones Chinese Fishing Village, and archival materials documenting the lives of Chinese fisher families in early 1900s Pacific Grove — alongside Abyssal, a porcelain massage table created in the wake of the 2021 Atlanta Spa Shootings, traveling to Stanford from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Culminating Chang's year-long residency at Hopkins Marine Station through the Denning Visiting Artist program, the exhibition surfaces forgotten collaborators, unrecorded histories, and the mysterious intimacies that haunt the Pacific coast — a project of radical grief, care, and witness.

Patty Chang: surfacing will be on view in the Wisch Family Gallery from September 17, 2026 to February 8, 2027.

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Panelists

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.

Kelsey Chen is an interdisciplinary theorist, artist, and PhD Candidate in Modern Thought & Literature at Stanford University. Her scholarly work has been generously supported by the ACLS, the Stanford Arts Institute, the Mellon Foundation, the Stanford Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity, the Stanford Center for Spatial & Textual Analysis, and the Pigott Fellowship. Her artistic work has been supported by the Anicka Yi Studios Metaspore fellowship and exhibited at et al gallery and 120710 gallery. While at Stanford, Kelsey was graduate co-chair of the Stanford Humanities Center Asian Diasporic Art & Aesthetics Workshop and has founded and led a handful of graduate-led initiatives, including the Ancient Futures symposium and the Materials & Culture Research-Creation Workshop. She is currently artist-in-residence at Now Place, an independent bookstore and press in San Francisco Chinatown.

Marci Kwon is Associate Professor of Art & Art History and Marta Sutton Weeks Faculty Scholar in the Humanities at Stanford University. With Aleesa Pitchmarn Alexander, she co-directs the university's Asian American Art Initiative.  At Stanford, Kwon is a faculty affiliate of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, Asian American Studies, American Studies, the Center for East Asia, and Feminist and Gender Studies, and serves on the steering committee of Modern Thought and Literature. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the Asian American Studies Faculty Prize, the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity Teaching Award, the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Award, the Faculty Women's Forum's Inspiring Early Career Academic Award, the Mellon Emerging Faculty Leaders Award, the Howard Foundation Award, the Leonard A. Lauder Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts, and the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.