Patty Chang has cited the work of the seminal performance artist Marina Abramovic and the films of Jean Cocteau as inspiration. Chang is a performance artist whose roots can be traced back to the Surrealists’ double-edged struggle with unconscious desires, which, as the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan once stated, are always the desires of another person’s desires, whatever those desires may be.

Where the Surrealists remained safely at a distance from their audience― whom they sought to amuse and shock—Patty Chang literally plays out the desires of the Other on her own body. While her performances, and the videos and photographs derived from them, deliberately elicit uneasy responses from viewers— ranging from dizziness and feelings of discomfort to shock and repulsion—they are clearly much more disagreeable to the artist herself. In these works, Chang dispels any ironic distance between herself and the objects with which—in her own words—she “interacts passionately.”

In her most recent works, she has reversed earlier strategies by slowly withdrawing her own physical presence, in favor of a community-based, participatory approach. In these new pieces, the viewers instead are meant to carry out these expressions of desire and interactions themselves.