Anne Anlin Cheng and Patty Chang on Beauty and Violence
The scholar and artist discuss the afterlives of anti-Asian violence, the tender possibilities of rupture, the beauty of squids, and more.
When I first saw Patty Chang’s short film “Melons (At a Loss)” (1988), I was stunned by its cheeky and chilling meditation on the female Asian-American body and how it carries the weight of historic inheritance, both within the family and the nation.
The stationary camera shows Chang herself, waist up, dressed in nothing but a 1940s-ish cone-shaped “bullet bra.” (Already, femininity flirts with aggression.) Chang places on the top of her head a ceramic plate that she tells us she inherited from a dead aunt. As she balances the plate, she verbally narrates the history behind this commemorative (that is, unusable) porcelain plate, with its poisonous dye. With this object, Chang references not only a familial and feminized legacy, but also a much larger and longer heritage of porcelain as a historically transglobal commodity of Euro-American desire, and how that material desire has shaped Western conceptualization of Asiatic persons and things from the 18th century to this day. The weight of these multiple layers of legacy, Chang suggests, has conscripted the Asian-American female body, its physical and affective comportment.
But Chang’s intervention gets even darker. As she talks, she raises a large paring knife with her right hand and begins to saw, with great difficulty and persistence, her bra-covered left breast. This act of self-mutilation lasts for almost a full, unbearable minute; we are only offered some relief when Change finally peels back the severed bra cup to reveal a real melon (a visual and verbal pun). Chang then proceeds to scoop out the innards of the melon flesh with a slightly too-large spoon and feed herself with it, even as she continues to try to talk. This act of self-feeding (or self-cannibalism?) turns a gesture of nourishment into one of violence; Chang’s movements gain speed and become increasingly frantic as she shoves the food down her mouth between words and garbled breaths.
