When schools shut down in March 2020, artist Patty Chang decided that she needed an above-ground swimming pool. “That was the first thing I thought,” Chang recalls. “Because, what are they going to do?” Her son Leroy, then 8, was in a pod with four other children, and she felt like the pool would provide the perfect container, a predetermined activity for these newly unmoored children.
They ordered one online, set it up in the backyard, and all summer, the children swam. Two years later, when the pool’s urgent usefulness had receded and the lightly chlorined water had grown dark with algae, it served another purpose. It became the film set for the final act of “We Are All Mothers” (2022) , a video essay by Chang currently on view in “Scratching at the Moon” at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, an intimate exhibition of Asian American artists working in Los Angeles.
When she was working on the video, Chang asked her son if he would swim with her. He agreed and the two of them donned wet suits on a cold night and used GoPros to film underwater. The resulting footage feels familiar, playful and also ethereal — sometimes it’s clear that we are watching a body swimming, and other times, all we get is a blur of light, a glimpse of hair, or the blown-out colors of the wet suit blurred by water.
While this imagery plays out onscreen, Chang’s clear, resolved voice lists the crises specific to birthing and raising a child: “The crisis of not bein.
