Isaac Chong Wai

In A selfie that celebrated a murder incident in the no man’s land (2019), Chong takes this temporal manipulation to a dysfunctional halt. Citing a video leaked online about a brutal killing of anonymous men in the open sea, the artist screen-captured 91 consecutive still frames at the end of the video, when the perpetrators celebrated the incident by taking selfies with each other. These pixelated still images are laser-etched into separate glass blocks and displayed chronologically, like a row of memorials. Cast in a material reserved for awards, achievements and anniversaries, the blocks amplify the celebratory mood of the selfie-takers, which complicates the narrative of that they are mere cold-blooded killers devoid of contexts and feelings. From his own selfie as a victim to the selfies of others as attackers, the artist turns his gaze from himself to the assailants, pitting himself against the evasion of justice, the lawlessness of international waters, and the banality of taking a selfie.

Some boundaries take mobile and animate forms, like the policemen who move across the urban landscape countering the movements of protesters. In Rehearsal of the Futures: Police Training Exercises (2018), Chong choreographs the movement of uniformed riot police in a tortuously slow motion, imbuing their originally violent intentions with a paradoxical gentleness and beauty. These decelerated actions visualise the slow violence inflicted upon individuals by the collective power structures. This work was commissioned by M+ as part of “M+ Live Art: Audience as Performer” (2018).

The work originates from a traumatising attack by a stranger on the street in a foreign country, which led the artist to contemplate one’s position in the society and in the world.

Chong’s new mixed media installation Hong Kong and Hong Kong induces the humming of the Chinese national anthem, in which a Hong Kong SAR flag is “frozen and suspended” in a resin crystal, forever dormant. How is it like to hold Hong Kong unchanged for 50 years?

Falling Exercise and Help! Help? Help, document the collective performances of falling and aiding. Through the cyclical processes of falling and standing up, and the reciprocal role of helping and being helped, Chong uses his performances to investigate the formation of individual and collective consciousness, as well as the consolidation of societal norms.

Isaac Chong Wai was attacked in November 2015 on the street of Berlin, the city he lives in. A stranger started a conversation with him, but abruptly hurled racial insults and then bludgeoned his head with a glass bottle. The artist took this self-portrait as evidence of his injuries. A friend later cautioned him that “the world is not your friend.” In resistance to the definitive pessimism in his friend’s advice, the artist turns the negation into an inquisitive question. In another work based on personal experience, I Dated a Guy in Buchenwald (2013), the artist asks his date François to write about their date at the Nazi German concentration camp. The resulting text is an affirmation of the goodness and warmth of humanity, a redemptive contrast from the horror of the camp and the hate crime the artist suffered later.

Incorporating works from 2013 to 2019, the ensemble can be loosely divided into four related themes: Prison, Borders, Reconciliation, and International Waters. In the Prison Project, the artist made a life-size boat out of segments of wire fences he cut out from a prison in Weimar. While the boat is made out of penetrable metal fences and is thus futile as a transportation vessel, the artist dragged it across the city of Weimar back to the prison, charting a fictional path between geographical mobility and escapist fantasy.

Seven participants were invited to perform in Bremen at the Immigration Office Gallery. They were asked to adjust their height in order to get “a line” above their heads. Every participant took turns to pose as the model according to whom the other participants adjusted their height. This work highlights the subjectivity of norms and standards and how easily it is subject to change: who is leading the game? Who shall we all copy to meet so-called standards?

Equilibrium is a series of performances with video, photography and paper documentations. The works engage in interaction of human scales and bodies, and highlight the subjectivity of norms and standards where the body is rendered as marker of physical territories.