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A performance juggling a narrative of an imaginary cultural ritual of receiving a plate at a relatives death with the act of cutting and eating a melon while balancing a plate on the head. Melons is a video based on images and script about my aunt’s death from breast cancer and the emotion void in my memory. The text is a construction of rituals that plays with notions of the authentic. The act of juggling too much text and imagery immerses the viewer in a third, imagined narrative.
Patty Chang examines the idea of Shangri-La, the mythical hamlet of James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizon, which has come to represent a romanticized, exotic paradise in the English-speaking world. Chang’s video installation documents and explores her journey to an imaginary place—and to a town recently named Shangri-La by the Chinese government to exploit its touristic potential.
A video work that visually alludes to Andrew Wyeth's painting "Christina's World" (1948) and depicts Chang on a suburban lawn that is curiously destabilizing.
Route 3 is a film a surrealistic and ethnographic account of a newly completed highway in rural Laos. Paid for by Chinese and Thai development funds it is the first modern highway to connecting China to Thailand through the former Golden Triangle. Route 3 has accelerated Chinese development of Lao agricultural, gambling, and prostitution industries, and the migration of rural Lao minority populations to the growing roadside towns. The video considers the enigmatic changes in the visual landscape including the proliferation of hair salons, casinos, and markets for cheap industrial Thai and Chinese products. Continuing the directors’ work with performance and landscape, the film results in a ethno-fantastic panorama of this site.
