Image: Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University
‘Patty Chang: surfacing’ is on view at the Anderson Collection from September 17, 2026, through February 8, 2027. The exhibition is the first solo artist commission by Stanford’s Asian American Art Initiative.
The exhibition culminates a year-long residency through the Denning Visiting Artist program, during which Chang was embedded at Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station. It is organized by the Anderson Collection at Stanford University and co-curated by Kelsey Chen and Marci Kwon. Chen is an interdisciplinary theorist, artist and PhD Candidate in Modern Thought & Literature; Kwon is Associate Professor of Art & Art History and Marta Sutton Weeks Faculty Scholar in the Humanities.
In ‘surfacing,’ Patty Chang engages the ocean as a physical, geopolitical and symbolic space, inviting consideration of the work of collection and recollection. Chang’s multimedia sculptural practice brings together archaeological remains from Point Alones Chinese Fishing Village, now the site of Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station, fish specimens from Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, and archival materials documenting the lives of Chinese fisher families on the Monterey Peninsula.
The exhibition’s central sculptural work is a porcelain massage table originally commissioned for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition ‘Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie.’ The table now travels to Stanford to take new form as a surface upon which to dry squid.
This act of transmutation connects histories of the ocean, labor, and racial and gendered violence. Those histories include the transpacific migration of porcelain and people, the scientific collection of marine specimens, the labor of fishing and drying squid, and the 2021 Atlanta Spa Shootings.
