Isaac Chong Wai
Equilibrium No.8 - Boundaries, Hong Kong
Equilibrium No.8 – Boundaries by Isaac Chong Wai is a large-scale scroll drawing that derives from a performance, documented in a video accompanying the drawing. Jointly, these works examine intimacy, distance, human forms, and create overlapping and personal spaces where the boundaries of the body are extended. In the performance, the participants, lying face-down on the floor, are invited to draw the space that they can reach on a 7 metres long paper. Each participant holds two pieces of charcoal in their hands and draws until the charcoals are fully consumed. During the performance, the sound of drawing, like waves, fills the silence of the audience. Tracing the presence of the bodies, the movements of the arms outline the silhouette of the participants and portray the symmetrical balance unconsciously. The work is at the same time an experimentation through performance with the idioms of ink painting and its art historiography. It may also be read in the context of representing a multitude, as the work can be linked back to the world-wide circulated images of young Hong Kong people laying on the ground in protest during the 2014 Umbrella movement.
The conceptual, political, and performative qualities of Isaac Chong Wai’s practice are incorporated by an interdisciplinary approach, processing the exigency of societal shifts and global phenomena. His subtle, poetic, and yet critical works infiltrate the systems of meanings, inviting viewers to re-examine his edited representations of, among others, the body, powerlessness, violence, collectivism, leaderlessness, and mourning. He works across a range of media, comprising performance, sculpture, video, painting, and photography. Chong is one of the most active and acclaimed artists in the dance and performance field in Germany, often using his language on body politics to voice out, through poetics, the political frictions in Hong Kong and other contexts of intensified state control.
