Rehearsed, Mirrored
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.
Text by Lotte Laub
Rehearsed, Mirrored: Dancing #1 (2024)
Isaac Chong Wai
Acrylic glass and mirror
40 × 30cm
unique
Photo 1 by Luka Naujoks
Rehearsed, Mirrored: Dance of Falling #1 (2024)
Isaac Chong Wai
Acrylic glass and mirror
180 × 240cm
unique
Photo 2 by Chroma, Istanbul
© Henning Rogge/Deichtorhallen Hamburg