Patty Chang: The Wandering Lake

The Queens Museum is excited to present Patty Chang’s most extensive work to date, The Wandering Lake (2009–2017), a project that redefines the roles of artists, images, and performance in the construction of narratives through an exhibition that integrates video projection, photography, sculpture, publication, and performance as one expansive body of work.

The Wandering Lake is a personal, associative, narrative meditation on mourning, caregiving, and landscape. The exhibition of this project at the Queens Museum will be designed to mirror Chang’s larger artistic approach; a singular complex narrative will be presented through an installation that attempts to replicate the complex way stories develop—through geography, history, cultural mythology, fiction, and personal experience. While Chang’s multi-year project was in part inspired by turn-of-the-century colonial explorer Sven Hedin’s book Wandering Lake (1938)—which tells the story of a migrating body of water in the Chinese desert—the project also chronicles the loss of Chang’s father as well as her pregnancy and the birth of her son.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.