Falling Carefully: Isaac Chong Wai

Zilberman | Berlin is delighted to announce the solo exhibition Falling Carefully by Isaac Chong Wai.

Drawing upon his practice of performative art works, Isaac Chong Wai presents in Falling Carefully works in a painterly or sculptural medium, in which he investigates the processes of image generation that arise in movement and choreographic structures. For this exhibition, Chong created a new series of works entitled Rehearsed, Mirrored, in which he has etched bodies in motion on mirrors and glass panels. Moreover, we present a video installation of his performances Falling Exercise and Help! Help? Help. (both from 2016).

At this year’s Venice Biennale, Foreigners Everywhere, Chong’s performance and large-format, 7-channel video installation Falling Reversely is being shown in a space extending over 300 square meters of the Arsenale. In that work, Chong employs a choreography of falling to investigate collective forms of resistance to racially motivated aggression and institutional violence. In the exhibition Falling Carefully at the Zilberman, as well, Chong portrays the falling movements of individuals who are caught by the careful intervention of sympathetic by-standers. In this way, Chong turns the feeling of powerlessness into a feeling of trust in the help of others, by decelerating the falling movement or embedding the falling body in the supporting structure of a collective.

Chong portrays the act of falling as a recurrent process intimately tied to human existence. He mitigates the negative connotations of falling by allowing the falling body to be supported by others in a gentle counter-motion. The empathy of others, who come to help and enable him to stand up again, relieves the falling person of the terrible feeling that something irreversible is happening.

In the series of works entitled Rehearsed, Mirrored (2024), Chong etches traces of movement in mirrors and glass panels. His process recalls the movement studies of Eadweard Muybridge, where every phase of a movement is captured in a momentary photographic image, or the futuristic sculptures of Umberto Boccioni. The lines Chong etches on mirror and glass reproduce the blurriness caused by motion or the successive stages of a movement process. He shows bodies in movements that reveal their emotional interconnectedness: they hug each other, dance together, help each other, support and protect one another. Chong lays over a mirror painted with a body in motion a glass panel showing a body performing a similar movement, but in mirror image to the first. As in an act of restitution, he thus stabilizes the underlying form.

In dance class and rehearsals, the mirror is there to let dancers precisely observe, assess, and correct their own body movements. Chong’s life-size quadriptych, again from the series Rehearsed, Mirrored, creates a connection between the etched traces of dancing bodies on two levels – the mirror and glass overlying it. But we, too, as observers, compare our own movements with those which Chong presents, or those which have passed before us. Through this temporality, Chong conveys the impression of an incessant flow of movement, of a cycle in which falling, standing up, supporting, and helping merge into a unified image, a choreography. 

Using an aesthetic of cut-out figures, Chong paints arms holding a body aloft that, owing to their dense and overlapping lines, appear almost abstract. Like dance notation scores, they thus elude tangibility. This impression is reinforced by the incident light, which alters the visibility of the engravings. The stacked forms oscillate between the recognizably figurative and the abstract.

Mirror and glass are recurring materials in Isaac Chong Wai’s artistic practice. Most recently, he used them in the series Breath Marks, in Missing Spaces, and in various light boxes made of mirrors, in which lettering is embedded. In the works presented in the exhibition Falling Carefully, as well, mirror and glass constitute both material and motif. Mirror and glass can serve the purpose of supervision no less than of transparency. A window both divides and connects us. A mirror can serve to reassure the self, to call for a change of perspective, to discover the truth; but it can do the opposite, too. It also stands for illusion and deceit, for instance for a person’s misreading of how he appears to others. Mirror and glass convey ambivalent feelings such as vulnerability, and also resilience. But note that Isaac Chong Wai, in his work, treats vulnerability as a sign not only dependency, but also of receptivity – as a source of empathy.

Text: Lotte Laub, translated by Darrell Wilkins

Isaac Chong Wai (b. 1990) is a participating artist in this year’s 60th Venice Biennale, Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adriano Pedrosa. Also this year, Chong received the Art Prize of the City of Nordhorn 2024, a prize awarded since 1979 to artists who have attracted attention with a fresh and nationally significant body of work. Chong's recent exhibitions include the Bangkok Art Biennale, Bangkok 2024 and the Biennale Sesc_Videobrasil, São Paolo 2023. His works have been exhibited at prestigious venues including the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, the MMCA in Seoul, IFFR in Rotterdam, MOCA in Taipei, and M+ in Hong Kong. His works are represented in renowned collections, including the Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Berlin, where the works were included in the Museum’s revised permanent exhibition, which opened in 2023; in Germany’s Bundeskunstsammlung; in Kadist, Paris and San Francisco; and in the Burger Collection, Hong Kong. He was awarded the New York Désirée & Hans Michael Jebsen Fellowship from the Asian Cultural Council and was a fellow of the Tarabya Cultural Academy. In 2024, the Tagesspiegel named Chong one of the TOP 100 personalities in Berlin’s culture scene. Isaac Chong Wai studied Fine Arts at the Hong Kong Baptist University and Art in Public Space and New Artistic Strategies at the Bauhaus University in Weimar. He lives and works in Berlin and Hong Kong.

A catalog will be published to accompany the exhibition. For further information, please contact the gallery at: berlin@zilbermangallery.com