Patty Chang's Unscientific Questions

Patty Chang. Touch Archive, 2025, installation view. Courtesy of the artist and BANK NYC; Photographed by Inna Svyatsky / @installshots.art.

By AIDAN CHISHOLM May 2, 2025

Milk is a tether that connects bodies within expansive, tangible constellations. Exceeding the false threshold of the skin, the fluid rife with symbolism prompts thinking beyond fictions of the body as a sealed-off, impermeable entity. In the work of Patty Chang, milk is a source of nourishment and a material conduit of care, a charged substance that renders undeniable the interconnectedness of bodies co-enmeshed within the ecosystem.

At Bank Society in Lower Manhattan, Touch Archive centers on We Are All Mothers (2022), a diaristic video account of Chang’s ongoing collaboration with cultural theorist Astrida Neimanis and wildlife pathologist Aleksija Neimanis, who led the group through autopsies of porpoises during COVID-era Zoom meetings. In an accompanying voiceover, the artist reflects on the particularly profound discovery of breastmilk in the stomach of a young deceased porpoise. The artist asks a series of both “scientific questions” and “unscientific questions,” the latter charged with emotional weight—“What was the porpoise feeling when it was caught in the net? Did it know it was going to die? Was its mother there? Did its mother know it was going to die?” Chang then shifts to consider her own child, asking “What would I do in this situation if my child were caught in a net and there was no possible way to save him?” This is where the power of the aptly titled exhibition lies: Chang claims affect—fear and grief—as a critical mindset, necessary in this age of ecological precarities. Chang evokes the interconnectedness of life and death with poetic tenderness and candid vulnerability. 

This interdisciplinary, collaborative project—a sort of epistemological inquiry—explicitly confronts the limitations of established scientific methodologies through the introduction of a ritual: before each dissection, Aleksija pauses to touch the carcass. A simple yet intimate gesture of care, this moment of attunement allows for gratitude toward the porpoise as a research subject.  “The touch goes both ways,” Chang’s narration explains. “The scientist supports the animal just as the animal supports the scientist.”

Patty Chang. Touch Archive, 2025, installation view. Courtesy of the artist and BANK NYC; Photographed by Inna Svyatsky / @installshots.art.

Chang extends this ritual through Memory Game (2022), an accompanying activity premised on matching images of the scientist’s gloved hand touching the porpoise flesh. With the cards displayed in a grid on a table in front of the video, Chang invites viewers to participate in the act of touching through active remembrance that doubles as a mode of witnessing. This game stripped of playfulness is equally resonant in concept and practice, maintaining a quiet poignancy echoed by Things I’m Scared of Right Now (2018), a four-page handwritten list of fears generated by the artist. Ranging from “death of the human species” to “phlegm that won’t come out” to “Donald Trump being a mole” to “water running out,” this stream of consciousness complicates any distinction between the mundane and the existential, the rational and the irrational. This frank mediation on the very phenomenon of fear avoids excessive sentimentality—or perhaps instead challenges negative associations with “sentimentality.”

Patty Chang, Things I’m Scared of Right Now (detail), 2018, four archival inkjet prints, 25 × 51 cm each. Courtesy: Patty Chang and BANK NYC. 

We Are All Mothers includes an excerpt of Milk Debt (2020), an earlier video installation likewise centered on milk, though specifically human milk. Milk Debt records nine performers pumping breast milk, each while simultaneously reciting crowd-sourced fears at infrastructural sites across Los Angeles. By foregrounding the mechanized act of pumping milk in the context of ecological depletion, the project evokes breast milk—a bodily fluid charged with gendered, racialized, and classed reproductive politics under the enclosures of late capitalism and settler colonialism—to engage broader discussions of environmental justice. Milk Debt plays upon the impersonal capitalist rhetoric of “debt” to instead propose a model of affective engagement through milk as an embodied mode of care. This expansive notion of debt, particularly in liquid form, extends to We Are All Mothers, insofar as both projects question not only what we owe our biological kin and other humans, but also what we owe the ecosystem in which we are enmeshed with other animate and inanimate matter—an increasingly obvious and seemingly insurmountable debt.

The title, We Are All Mothers, might initially read as essentialist. But Chang evokes motherhood not as a biological inevitability, with women predisposed to care, but as a praxis that reckons with the porous boundaries between bodies, as a mode of interspecies responsibility. Despite the generalizing scope of the title, Chang further resists universalism in foregrounding the specificity of her own experience, her presence visible in the video’s Zoom frame and audible in the voiceover. Underwater footage of her son swimming further heightens the personal quality, while enacting an interspecies parallel with the water-borne porpoise, which she in fact likens to her own child in the voiceover. In evoking the deceased animal—and also her artistic practice—as kin, Chang articulates an expansive vision of caretaking that transcends biological ties, and the human species altogether. 

We Are All Mothers manages to cultivate a model of interspecies kin without relying on moralizing appeals, sanitized metaphors, or didactic refrains. Chang effectively gives form to affective experience, where to care is to witness, to touch, to remember.  

We Are All Mothers was on view at BANK NYC through April 26, 2025.