Rehearsed, Mirrored
Hand-etched movements on acrylic glass and mirror referencing the artist’s rehearsals of Falling Reversely, featured at the 60th Venice Biennale (2024).
Rehearsed, Mirrored (2024) is a series of hand-etched glass and mirror works by Chong, developed from rehearsal materials for his performance Falling Reversely, commissioned for the 60th Venice Biennale. In this series, Chong meticulously etches traces of bodily movement onto two separate acrylic glass sheets—one later flipped and layered over the other—creating an uncanny sense of mirrored balance.
Recalling the movement studies of Eadweard Muybridge and the dynamic forms of Umberto Boccioni, Chong’s etched lines capture the blur and rhythm of motion, translating temporal movement into static form. The overlapping glass and mirror panels depict figures in reciprocal gestures—embracing, dancing, supporting, and protecting one another—revealing an emotional interconnectedness within motion. By layering mirrored counterparts of the same movement, Chong performs an act of visual restitution, stabilizing and reuniting fragmented gestures into a resonant whole. 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.
Left 1: Rehearsed, Mirrored: Dance of Falling #1 (2024)
Isaac Chong Wai
Acrylic glass and mirror
180 × 240cm
unique
Left 2: Rehearsed, Mirrored: Falling #1 (2024)
Isaac Chong Wai
Acrylic glass and mirror
40 × 30cm
unique
Right: Rehearsed, Mirrored: Dancing #1 (2024)
Isaac Chong Wai
Acrylic glass and mirror
40 × 30cm
unique
Photos by Luka Naujoks
