From identity to relation: Patty Chang’s diasporic cartography

Abstract

This article examines the works of the Chinese American artist Patty Chang, tracing how Chang’s early deconstructive approach to Asian American identity evolves into her more recent diasporic approach to landscape and travel. The first section covers the early ‘body art’ phase of Chang’s career (from the late 1990s to the early 2000s). The second section focuses on the pivotal work Shangri-La (2005), which usefully illuminates Chang’s evolution from identity to relation, from deconstruction to ‘diasporic cartography’, using her diasporic body to forge a mode of navigation and world-making that is embodied, anti-systematic and relational in nature.