Patty Chang: Surfacing | closes on February 8, 2027

During SF Art Week, the Anderson Collection at Stanford University presents a week of programs around Patty Chang: Surfacing, the first solo artist commission of Stanford’s Asian American Art Initiative. Made during a year-long residency at Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station, the exhibition brings together archaeological remains from Point Alones Chinese Fishing Village, fish specimens from Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, archival records of Chinese fisher families on the Monterey Peninsula, and a porcelain massage table, first made for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, now used as a surface for drying squid.

Hopkins Marine Station sits on the site of Point Alones, where Chinese fishing families lived and worked until the village burned in 1906. Chang takes up the scientific habit of surveying and collecting, and turns it toward what those records left out. The porcelain table carries several histories at once: porcelain and people crossing the Pacific, the work of catching and drying squid, the collecting of marine specimens, and the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings. The exhibition is co-curated by Kelsey Chen, PhD candidate in Modern Thought & Literature, and Marci Kwon.

Anderson Collection Permanent Collection, Spotlight: Susan Rothenberg 

All programs are free. Surfacing is on view in the Wisch Family Gallery through February 8, 2027.

Images:

"Patty Chang: surfacing" installation view of porcelain massage tables covered in dried squid.

A short film on view in the Denning Family Resource Center features descendants of those displaced from the Point Alones Chinese Fishing Village

Patty Chang: surfacing (detail of soft sculpture made of hagfish skin)

Susan Rothenberg, "Blue U-Turn," 1989 Oil on canvas 91 x 112 in. 2025.1.6 Gift of Mary Patricia Anderson Pence