Isaac Chong Wai

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.

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.