The Wandering Lake is a personal, associative, narrative meditation on mourning, caregiving, geopolitics and landscape. Patty Chang is interested in looking at water resource as a political and poetical infrastructure. The project is, inspired by a turn-of-the-century colonial explorer Sven Hedin’s book Wandering Lake, in which he attempts to map location of a migrating body of water in the Chinese desert. The first trip was to Xinjiang province in Western China, a predominantly ethnic Uighar province, rich in oil where the wandering lake is located. Chang collaborated with local Uighar and Han girls on ephemeral sculptures. The second phase was a journey to Aral Sea in Uzbekistan that lost 70% of its water due to ill-planned Soviet irrigation projects. The artist traveled to the water line while pumping her breast milk along the way into empty fish cans and photographing them. In the third phase, Chang followed the longest aqueduct in the world, which brings water from southern China to the capital Beijing. She urinated every time she came upon the aqueduct, attempting to connect the aquaduct to the historic flooding of the Yellow River and Chinese imperial history, and to think about the massive infrastructure compared to the scale of the body. The Wandering Lake premiered in 2017 at the Queens Museum
The moving image installation (with the same title) documents Chang’s search for a shifting body of water in the Chinese desert, her travels to the shrinking sea of Aral, her own experience with motherhood, and the ritual washing of a whale corpse. The work poignantly connects bodies and landscapes, reminding us that both are, in her words, “temporary, lyrical, and impacted.”
Quote from the book The Wandering Lake(Patty Chang, 2017)
“The island of Newfoundland is situated at the easternmost point of North America. Neighboring Fogo Island is an old fishing island. Since the 1992 Canadian moratorium on cod, people do not fish there anymore for money. The lack of industry recently prompted the formation of an art residency, which was hoped to generate art tourism; the idea was that one can lead with the arts and economy would follow. The location of the residency is interesting: if you have read Mark Kurlansky’s Cod: A Biography (1997), you’ll know that the waters off Newfoundland are where the Basques came to fish for cod in the 1400s. They kept this fishing grounds secret, fearing others would follow. But the new world would not be secret for long.”
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