Maternal Relief: Patty Chang's “MILK DEBT”

By Jennifer S. Li

If a single artwork could sum up the cultural gestalt of a pandemic-gripped, politically anxious global citizenry in 2020, performance and video artist Patty Chang’s Milk Debt does. The project began in 2017, when Chang was conducting research at the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California. Anxiety over a new presidential administration, climate change, and an uncertain future ahead of her young son overwhelmed the artist, causing her to sideline the task at hand and instead scrawl a purgative four-page list of her fears. This single personal act grew to become multiple and communal as Chang asked friends and colleagues—and later strangers in an open call—to share what plagued them. Some of the fears were solicited in Hong Kong, on the occasion of Chang’s artist residency through the University of Hong Kong in 2019, which coincided with nearly six months of widespread civil unrest over the contested and subsequently withdrawn extradition bill. These lists eventually culminated in Chang’s latest work, Milk Debt (2020), a five-channel, multi-screen installation in which litanies of preoccupations scroll up like movie end credits. Four of the screens feature women pumping breast milk as they incant the worries of strangers—a few of the women were captured on Zoom recordings to adhere to the reality of our new but tiresome Covid-19 social distancing protocols. Chang’s Milk Debt explores the peculiarity of this historical moment not through our hopes and dreams for and of the exterior world, but through our interiority, our palpable collective angst, and the salve of the invisible domestic labor of women. Standing in the center of the darkened room, surrounded by scrolling lists and incantations of fears, the installation was not unlike a confessional, in which the lactating women anoint and absolve us...READ MORE

Installation view of PATTY CHANG’s “Milk Debt,” at 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica, 2020. All images courtesy the artist.

Cover Image: PATTY CHANG, Milk Debt, 2020, still from two-channel video installation: 53 min.