'A body with integrity is hard to find. Perhaps I am trying to take my damaged, divided and immoral body, and [make] it as whole as possible.' - Patty Chang in a 2003 interview with Eve Oishi There is a woman looking in the mirror. She is staring into her own eyes, contemplating. Suddenly, she purses her lips and sucks the mirror up, leaving traces of dry glass to be filled in. As it turns out, the woman is not stood up, gazing into her reflection. She is bent over a mirror on the ground, slurping up water. She is greedy and nauseating and repeatedly warping her own face through the movement of water but somehow not interrupting the erotic in the process. She is Narcissus with the frame propped upright. She is Jean Cocteau's Orpheus attempting to pry open the door to the underworld. This is the premise of Patty Chang's 1999 performance art video, Fountain , and I find it mesmerising. As an innately egoistic and sometimes destructive venture, performance art c...