in conversation: isaac chong wai
Isaac Chong Wai at ACUD Macht Neu, in front of an installation of his work “Rehearsal of the Futures: Is the World Your Friend?” Photo taken by Tobias König, image courtesy of the artist.
Isaac Chong Wai (b. 1990) is a Berlin - based artist from Hong Kong. Chong’s versatile site- specific practice that traverses across performances, video, installation, and photography engages public spaces and our individual and collective associations with it. Chong holds degrees from Academy of Visual Arts at Hong Kong Baptist University and Bauhaus-Universität in Weimar, Germany. The artist's recent solo exhibitions were at Museum Schloss Moyland, Moyland (2023); Una Boccata d’Arte, Fondazione Elpis, and Galleria Continua, Castiglione di Sicilia (2022); Zilberman Selected, Istanbul (2022) and Bilsart, Istanbul (2021).
LUCIJA ŠUTEJ: Your work references the systems of meanings - how realities are perceived. Perhaps we could focus on how you see the role of performance as a medium to address this.
ISAAC CHONG WAI: Performance edits realities. It challenges our preconceived notions and understanding of the body in time and space. I often approach my ideas through queering, disrupting, and altering the hierarchies of meanings, where the recognizable becomes uncanny, fragmented, and clashed.
LŠ: How did you enter the field of performance? What attracted you initially? Could we also touch upon the prominent subject of intimacy in your work?
ICW: In 2012, I developed a series of works dealing with distance and intimacy between people through experiments. For example, I kissed someone while putting a camera in my mouth to capture the pixelated black color when our mouths were closed; I placed my forehead against someone else's to observe the differences in the red marks on our foreheads.
My childhood experiences played a part as well. As a kid, I was discovered to be the best singer in the class. I remember practicing every day for two hours before morning classes to prepare myself well for competitions. That experience helped me when it came to performing in front of an audience.
LŠ: An element that traverses your performative work is contemplating the complex relationship between past and present - looking at possible future scenarios. How was your research sparked, and how did living in different places and countries affect your work?
ICW: It started in Weimar. When I lived in Weimar from 2013 to 2015, I felt like I was living in a constant renewal of the past. Monuments and historical sites are carefully preserved, and even walls are regularly repainted. The city attempts to offer an experience to people by presenting the newest version of the past.
I focused on art in public spaces and researched sites, including memorials and forgotten places of memory. For instance, Weimarplatz, formerly known as Gauforum, and Karl-Marx-Platz are notable examples. In 2015, the performance One Sound of the Histories, invited numerous people to stand as living memorials and simultaneously talking about their own pasts. This square was constructed by the Nazis in 1936 as one of the most significant architectural projects for the National Socialists in Weimar. It was referred to as Adolf Hitler Square by some. Following World War II, the square underwent a renaming and became Karl-Marx-Platz during the GDR era. After the Berlin Wall fell, the square remained nameless up until 1999. When Weimar became the European Capital of Culture, the architecture was named Weimarplatz. In 2005, the square underwent a further renovation, involving the placement of an underground car park and transforming the surface into a green meadow. The design created a “floating" island where no one can gather.
Another work that I created in Weimar is called I Dated a Guy in Buchenwald (2013). In this piece, I met a guy through a dating app, and we decided to have our date at the Buchenwald Memorial, where homosexuals were persecuted and executed. We kissed inside the memorial building, and later, I asked François to write me a text about what happened on the date. In 2014, I showed this work at the Moscow Biennial for Young Art, curated by David Elliott, when Russia promoted the law to ban “gay propaganda" for the next 100 years. I gave a talk in Moscow and pointed out the danger of reverting to the past and referencing the history of Germany's criminal code Paragraph 175, which criminalized homosexuality and reinforced it during the Nazi era.
LŠ: The body is a vital medium in your work- in your performances, as in many rituals, it is a medium to remember.
ICW: Memorials build the representation of remembrance, while only participation creates the memories. We need the living body to remember, and we need practice to avoid forgetting. The question “What if the body becomes the memorial?” came to my mind when I developed my solo exhibition What is the future in the past? And what is the past in the future?. The presentation dealt with the presence of the body in the current time and the hegemony of history, and the work was shown at Bauhaus Museum in Weimar in 2016, Goethe-institut in Hong Kong in 2018 and Zilberman in Berlin in 2019. When thinking about this series of works, I recall the Māori proverb ‘Ka mua, ka muri' – Walking backward into the future.
LŠ: Your performative work also touches upon scenarios of how the connection between an individual and collective will be created in the future. We could argue that your performances are rehearsals of different future scenarios, and it would be great to hear more of One Sound of the Futures' work that took place across three cities - Wuhan, Seoul, and Hong Kong.
ICW: On May 18, 2016, I invited interested audience members to participate as performers in a performance of One Sound of the Futures (2016) in public spaces across Gwangju, Hong Kong, and Wuhan. The sites were selected as I was drawn to see how the different public spheres come together with the particular histories in these three cities. In each city, numerous people spoke about their futures simultaneously.
The performances took place in all three cities simultaneously, where participants were asked to stand with each person at a distance of approximately 2 meters. This arrangement allowed them to hear what others said when they stopped speaking. The specific distance constructed a space between private and public, due to the fact that everyone is speaking from a certain distance and the performer was at points surrounded by the overlapping voices. The overlapping noise created a space for people to talk about private things. The discussion topics ranged from different moments in the future, such as within a minute, a day, a week, a year, or even ten years. All these future-oriented sounds intertwined and became an inaudible noise.
In Gwangju, we made the performance at May 18 Democracy Square, which was the first proposed location. This site holds significant historical value and serves as a memorial for the Student Protest May 18 Gwangju Democratization Movement in 1980, where many students were shot. In Hong Kong, the first proposed location, Tamar Park, was rejected with the official reason being “The site will be under construction." Subsequently, we performed the work at the second proposed location, Kai Tak Runway Park, an artificial land surrounded by the renowned Victoria Harbour. However, in Wuhan, conducting the performance in a public space proved impossible. Instead, we held the work in a gallery space at K11.
All above images: One Sound of the Futures, 2016. Isaac Chong Wai Performance (took place) at Kai Tak Runway Park in Hong Kong, Democracy Square in Gwangju in South Korea, K11 Artist Village in Wuhan in China at the 5th Large-Scale Public Media Arts Exhibition - “Human Vibrations” curated by Caroline Ha Thuc. Produced by Hong Kong Arts Development Council © Isaac Chong Wai.
LŠ: Further, your performances are proposed as tools to address dialogues of vulnerability and resilience.
ICW: This reminds me of a project I am working on. It revolves around human warmth, the ephemeral breath marks, and the memorialization of the vulnerable. In the Breath Marks series, I use breath marks as a paintbrush to depict images. The collage of breath marks is presented through photographic prints and glass etching on multiple glass panels. The first piece I created in this series is titled Breath Marks: Mother with Her Dead Son (2022), which references the sculpture Mother with her Dead Son by Käthe Kollwitz, who lost her son in the First World War, dedicated many of her works to the mourning process of her son.
In the same project with ifa-Galerie, I researched the artwork The Mothers by Käthe Kollwitz, where a group of mothers hugging together as if forming a shelter for the children. I created a performance with the same name as her woodprint work. In the work, you see a group of singers engaging in a collective hug and constantly turning in a circle. The music was led by Dagmar Aigner, a singer and composer who has worked with mourners for over 10 years. We sang different songs, such as mourning songs, mantras, and lullabies. This piece took place during Berlin Art Week in 2022, within the context of the exhibition Spheres of Interest, curated by Inka Gressel and Susanne Weiß. I remember some people were crying, and some came to us and thanked us. I recall one person cried for the entire 2 hours while we performed. My performance might not necessarily provide the tools, but the space, emotions, and memories that resonate with the audience, where dialogues of vulnerability and resilience take place.
Die Mütter, 2022 (English title: The Mothers) by Isaac Chong Wai. Commissioned by ifa-Galerie Berlin. Singers: Dagmar Aigner, Paola Eleonora Bascon, Isaac Chong Wai, Zaki Hagins, Alena Magdalena, Sarai Baranco Merodio, Karin Mühlhoff, Eva Robayo, Nobutaka Shomura, Leela Tinelli, Winifred Wong © Victoria Tomaschko, ifa-Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen. Image courtesy of the artist.
LŠ: Your recent exhibition, The End of Growth at Museum Schloss Moyland, is in dialogue with the work of Joseph Beuys. Please tell us more about how the exhibition was created and the research behind it.
ICW: I was invited by the artistic director, Dr. Antje-Britt Mählmann, from Museum Schloss Moyland, to conduct research at the Museum and their Joseph Beuys Archive. Later, we put together a solo exhibition in dialogue with the works of Joseph Beuys at the Museum.
While examining Beuys's work 7000 Oaks, it caught my attention how he sees the ever-growing idea of the post - war period where we all come to a point on the planet that if we don't end the growth, we destroy ourselves. I was intrigued by his statement. He expressed that in this work, he perceives the basalt stones as monuments of ever-growing trees. In contrast, I explored the concept of the shrinking body in relation to the natural stone. I adjusted my height to match the height of a natural stone and took a series of photographs of it. There is an illusion of endless growth of the economy, territories, people, etc. But our body tells a different story; it will shrink and eventually become part of the earth or ashes. I titled this series of work The End of Growth (2023).
© Stiftung Museum Schloss Moyland/Maurice Dorren. The title of the series: The End of Growth, 2023. The title of particular prints, from the longest stone to the shortest stone: The End of Growth #1, 2023; The End of Growth #2, 2023; The End of Growth #3, 2023; The End of Growth #4, 2023; The End of Growth #5, 2023; by Isaac Chong Wai. Material: Archival pigment print 180 x 120cm. Commissioned by Museum Schloss Moyland “The End of Growth," features the artist adjusting his height alongside a large natural stone that resembles a human figure. In Joseph Beuys's statement regarding his iconic work “7000 Oaks," in which he viewed the stone as a monument to the tree, as the tree would grow but the stone wouldn't. In “The End of Growth," the artist shifts the focus from the idea of constant-growing to the human body, which will shrink or degenerate after a certain height is reached in one's life. Image courtesy of the artist.
LŠ: How do you see the meaning of historical sites as the spaces of memory in your work? Could we discuss the meaning of location and space in connection to your work?
ICW: Meaning changes, and I question those changes in my works.
LŠ: In your work, you question the role of public space - perhaps we could also discuss dismantling the meaning of “gallery” by bringing the public space into it. How do you respond to the architecture of certain places?
ICW: In site-specific performances, the context of the site becomes part of the performance, which includes the history, stories, theory, and raison d'etres of the place. I often question how specific movements or postures would echo the past when performed in the present.
In Crying Streetlight, the public space in this context is politically charged. Government officials design streetlights to represent their nations. I would like to know if public space/ the architectural structure has emotions and how it would be presented. But it depends on the work as every project is different. For example, in Crying Streetlight (2022), you see the skeleton of a streetlight made of metal and mounted with cable chains. I imagined how the streetlights were crying. I was interested in the national design of streetlights in public squares, such as those in the mausoleums of Tiananmen in Beijing, China, and the Kumsusan Palace of the Sun in Pyongyang, North Korea. The streetlights stand as witnesses of history and appear to be crying.
Crying Streetlight in Kumsusan Palace of the Sun (2022) by Isaac Chong Wai. Metal and cable chains ca. 310 x 330 x 330cm. Courtesy of the artist and Zilberman. Photo by Kayhan Kaygusuz
Crying Streetlight in Tiananmen Square, 2022 by Isaac Chong Wai. Metal and cable chains ca. 310 x 200 x 200cm. Courtesy of the artist and Zilberman. Photo by Kayhan Kaygusuz