Contemporary Art Eileen Chang
Patty Chang is a Chinese-American artist who specializes in video, writing, performance art, and installation. Like Eileen Chang, Patty Chang is also radical in that her art contradicts the stereotype surrounding Chinese-American women, as it is anything but passive. On the contrary, it is loud, highly sexualized, and highly controversial. The two pieces by Patty Chang chosen for this exhibition go as follows:
- In Love, 2001 Video: This video by Patty Change delves into familial structures and inheritance patterns that would have been familiar to Eileen Chang during her lifetime.
- Melons (At Loss), 1998 Video: This video calls attention to a common Chinese tradition that occurs at a time of profound loss while simultaneously revolutionizing that tradition, by demonstrating that maintaining a state that can exist between tradition and emotion is a balancing act for Chinese-American women.
Candice Lin:
The Chinese-American Female Experience During the 1960s:
Eileen Chang lived in Los Angeles during a tumultuous time for every aspect of her identity: an Asian woman in America. During the 1970s, the Vietnam War was in full swing, in addition to a re-awakened feminist movement begun by the likes of Gloria Steinem. There was racial prejudice against people of Asian descent simultaneously paired with a new love and appreciation for women’s bodies. In essence, Eileen Chang had to face the internal conflict that came with existing as someone with multiple identities that were at war with each other in the United States. Chang herself was already radical in terms of feminism, having openly discussed sex and female pleasure in her art and films; but American feminism did not always include all women. Feminism in the United States is arguably still struggling with the concept of intersectionality, which Eileen Chang fully existed in, because in the United States, she was “allowed” to celebrate her female identity but not her culture. The contemporary art and articles that I am including below illustrate the conflict that existed in the Chinese-American female identity from the 1970s until now.
New York Times Article: Asian American Women Struggling to Move Past Cultural Expectations (January 23rd, 1994- The last year of Eileen Chang’s life)
According to this article, Asian-American women were commonly typecast as “passive and industrious,” and they were not expected to “express opinions,” as their primary function was just to serve the family unit. The clash between the often-desired family-centric lifestyle in China and American individualism played to the cultural conflict that Chinese-American women faced in the United States, and how both cultures categorized them as passive because of where they came from. Eileen Chang was anything but passive, and I believe that including this article in the exhibition demonstrates the climate and stereotypes that she was up against during her time in the United States. (New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/1994/01/23/us/asian-american-women-struggling-to-move-past-cultural-expectations.html)