'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 can be alienating, though I'm sure there have been many performance artists who have enjoyed being so polemical. In the 1970s, this mode was embraced in all of its nebulous and controversial glory specifically because it was at odds with traditional art practice and sought to group together all of those whose works were concerned with the embodiment of a specific space, doing a specific task and relied heavily on a live audience reaction, and even participation. The art object was deliberately melded with the artists themselves, displacing the interpretation of the piece onto a real person, a process that is both more intimate and deliberately off-kilter, often divorcing the human body from the supposed familiarity of the everyday and distilling their actions into artistic expression only.
To collapse barriers in this way is to refuse literal objectification whilst also participating in it, merging your body with the surroundings, with objects, with other bodies. Early performance artists were arguing for an actualised artistic experience, befuddling and entrancing, as opposed to an art object separate from the self. As Erika Fischer-Lichte argues in her book, The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics, the relationship between 'the material and semiotic status' of an art object changes through its rendering as a performance, materiality severed from the stasis of meaning, the work essentially 'claim[ing] a life of its own'.
Chang's early work in particular finds its roots in performance, riot grrrl feminism and a provocative criticism of orientalist myths, all of which are merged within an imagist sensibility of recording the immediate present as concisely as possible. Ana Mendieta and Marina Abramovic are both potent influences for Chang's work, though I can also see flourishes of the Patty Chang ouevre in Valie Export's …Remote… Remote… (1973) and Hannah Wilke's Gestures (1974). All of these artists centred the morphing and even desecration of their own bodies as a mode of expression. Chang's video art in particular incorporated the outrageous punk sensibilities of the 1990s, hilarious and discomfiting, whilst also displaying a keen desire for a more tactile, embodied world, all of which was ironically mediated through the lens of a camera. Whether using fruit to represent her breast and scooping the flesh out to eat it, using sparkling water to shave her pubic hair or placing eels inside her shirt and sitting for an uncomfortable amount of time, Chang could not be separated from her provocations. She literally was them.
Even in the humour of stumbling around on water logged ground or deliberately parodying pornography by repeatedly having helium balloons sprayed in her face, there is an identification with the work that can be missing from traditional art, especially with work that evokes the kind of objectification that women tend to experience when they are at the centre of these pieces. When discussing body art, a genre closely associated with performance art, Amelia Jones argues in her book, Body Art: Performing the Subject, that the exaggerated performance of a gendered body gives the artist the opportunity to 'explode the myths of disinterestedness and universality that authorise [...] conventional modes of evaluation'. Chang has repeatedly rendered herself artistless, becoming immersed in the piece as opposed to being just 'Patty Chang', the person. She transformed herself into a blow-up doll, a contortionist and Bruce Lee, obscuring her identity and foregrounding it at the same time.
The access to cameras and the ubiquity of the cinematic approach to art has allowed many groups to conform, then distort and refract performance art as a mode. The tension within the pieces made by those who incorporate a digital element to their work is the fraying of the visceral present tense of performance from the 70s and the voyeuristic filmic gaze. The audience becomes ever-present, not evaporating once they leave the gallery. The fourth wall can be repeatedly broken and the video can be kept like a permanent memory, often betraying the performance's 'own ontology', as Peggy Phelan argues in the book, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. The unstatic screen makes time travellers of us all.
The extent that the digitising of performance art lessens the experience of watching it is hard to argue in 2026, where lived experience is continuously mediated and interpreted through a screen. In his article, Digital Liveness: A Historico-Philosophical Perspective, Philip Auslander makes the argument that the intepretation of the present as being in the room where it happened is not an entirely honest one. 'Liveness', Auslander insists, relies on the 'willingness' for an audience to interact with the performance in the first place, and accept its 'claim' of representing the present moment. This early work by Chang has a perverse replicability, as the modes of performing one's identity through the internet have become more accessible and more reliant on instinctual gut reactions. Performance art itself asks that you view the artist, the body, the room you are in and the world in general with some malleablity. It also asks that you trust your initial bodily reaction. The beauty of the video performance is viewing the same piece again and understanding it in an entirely new way.
Patty Chang's later work is less concerned with the artist herself and more interested in the gap between the world and the imagined version of it. Many of her films from later in the 2000s and 2010s were about China as both a cultivated image and a real country that people lived in, with the camera often existing in the gap between tourist and diasporic entity. To reconsider Fountain once more, there is a woman looking in the mirror. She is staring into her own eyes, contemplating the gap between herself and the camera, between herself and the mirror, between herself and the artist who created the piece. There is an imagined version of Patty Chang that we are seeing and watching move, and then there is the real Patty Chang, bent over a mirror, slurping seemingly endless amounts of water into her mouth. She is warping her own face. She is static and reverberating in the ripples. Patty Chang is not in the room right now. She was always in the room.
Further Reading:
Erika Balsom, Live and Direct: Cinema As A Performing Art
Laotze Missing (2008, directed by Patty Chang)
Rather to Potentialities (2009, directed by Patty Chang)
Cut Piece (1965, directed by David Maysles and Albert Maysles)
Kusama’s Self-Obliteration (1967, directed by Jud Yalkut)
Documentation of Selected Works (1971-1974, directed by Chris Burden)
Doll Clothes (1975, directed by Cindy Sherman)
Interior Scroll — The Cave (1995, directed by Carolee Schneemann)
Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, The Mistress And The Tangerine (2008, directed by Marion Cajori and Amei Wallach)
Queendom (2023, directed by Agniia Galdanova)
Sideshave (2024, directed by Carta Monir and Sir Testimony)
Actressfilmmaker (2026, directed by Mayaskye)