Special Effects

After signing off on the July/August issue of ArtAsiaPacific, the editors are hoping to savor two comparatively languid months off from the frantic art world calendar. However, world events, in Hong Kong and elsewhere, won’t relent. This issue is closely bound to the real world, and focuses on artists’ diverse interests and concerns—from how humans are speeding up our own extinction, to questioning how technology is reengineering life as we know it.

In issue 44, published in 2005, contributor Euridice Arratia interviewed managing editor Ysabelle Cheung takes another look into the works of Patty Chang, charting the profound environmental and sociological conditions that have engendered her recent projects. From mourning the demise of human civilization due to anthropogenic intervention, to navigating ideas of filial debt and repayment through the maternal medium of breast milk, Chang radically confronts the consequences of our existence on this ravaged planet. As Cheung notes, for Chang’s eight-year project , the artist “followed a path carved by civilization’s collective actions and enacted her own rituals in each place, suggesting that while we can’t ignore environmental devastation, we can, as individuals, ‘re-look at our relationship with our world from a non-hierarchal, noncapitalistic viewpoint.’”