Conditions and Predicaments of Time: Interview with Morgan Wong

Hong Kong-based Morgan Wong’s practice integrates objects, performance, and images to push boundaries of time, both in relation to his own body and to make visible its construct(s). Wong performed at the artist-run space 5533 in Istanbul on October 20, 2018 as part of his two-week research trip to the city through a grant provided by m-est.org, a publication initiative of which I’m co-editor. The method with which Wong deals with notions of time is specific and ambiguous, poetic and empirical, probing and removed. As time appears to flow in different speeds across histories and geographies, I extended the below questions to Morgan after he left Istanbul, asking him to contemplate what it means to repeat the same(ish) performance twice over the course of one week in two very different setups, as well as larger questions of temporality, futility and reproducibility.

Let’s begin with your most recent performance work Some Thoughts on Time Dilation (AAA, ABB, ABHK, America, Beuys, Bread, Cao, Einstein, Hare, Kentridge, Leung, Mangoes, Pythagoras, River, Wong Jr., Wong Sr. and possibly more) (2018). You performed this at 5533 in Istanbul. The first iteration of this work took place a week earlier at the Hong Kong Visual Arts Centre. What happened differently between the two renditions?

Some Thoughts on Time Dilation is a lecture-performance which in essence thinks about the possibility of multiple presences and how I am being situated in this possibility. The work uses time dilation—a scientific notion on varying speed of time in situations—as the key element in the performance and expands (as well as connects) to my personal encounters in the passage of time and the notion of repetition, scripts, fiction etc. This work also expresses my frustrations in navigating the differences between my recent research on the science of time and my perceptual notion of it. Like everyone else, I generally perceive the passage of time like a river which constantly flows; however, I have discovered through my research materials that the “passage of time” might be an illusion. The lecture-performance does not serve as a resolution for myself or for the audience, but it prompts us to engage in a dialogue. For example, the performance involves an explanation of an equation regarding time dilation. This part of the work might be confusing to some audience members. This is fine for me as I am treating this as part of the whole performance, instead of something functional in a pedagogic way. 

In the debut performance at Hong Kong Visual Arts Centre, there was a moment where I introduced my father as an impossible capture of my future (people mention that I look like my father). After the Hong Kong presentation, I felt that these types of personal anecdotes could have been emphasized, in order to bridge the audience with the highly theoretical content of the lecture-performance. During the second presentation at 5533 in Istanbul, I included more content in relation to my father as well as notes on his recent trip to Tibet. This choice is not random; places he visited in his trip, which were mainly in the Tibetan highlands, had a much higher altitude than where I was in Istanbul. This conceptually relates to the scientific effect which concerns time dilation—namely gravitational time dilation. 

I am struck by your interpretation of lecture-performance. I was once told by a curator that you either lecture or you perform and this hyphenation is problematic as you are not really dealing with the specifics of these forms. You appear to be moving back and forth between these two things, perched on that hyphen somewhat comfortably.

I believe I cannot separate parts of my lecture performance as “lecture” and as “performance.” Would you consider my drawing of a loaf of bread as a performance? Or would we say my walking back and forth between blackboard and the presentation table is a performance? What actually works as a “lecture” and what works as a “performance”?

I have studied this topic by watching lectures given by scientists, academics and enthusiasts on YouTube. I have also been lecturing on art for a few years now. The conceptual framework extends in a way to question the possibility of having multiple presences and whether we have a fixed future or not. This leads me to consider how lecture-performances are usually scripted and how they are being performed multiple times. My appearance and performance (here I mean performance as in something’s quality) in previous lectures prompt me to re-think the possibility of interfering in the past, one of my strategies in my practice.

You recently completed Our Feet Are Always Younger than Our Heads (2018)—a collaborative piece. How do you negotiate working with another body and another temporality?

I choreographed the piece with dancer and choreographer Jason Yap from Malaysia, who is based in Hong Kong. The crucial part of our negotiation was actually in determining the duration of the piece, which is one hour long. This one-hour element is performed six times consecutively in a day. This is very different from how a dancer normally works in terms of intensity, both physically and mentally. 

At first, my intent was to develop a pure formal dance piece to express the notion “our feet are always younger than our heads,” which relates to how a difference in altitude can result in differences in the speed of time. However, Jason and I realized that the content is so varied that the formal dance piece form would not suffice. Although the performance involves dance and video in an installation setting, I almost see the piece as a live-action essay film. 

The piece also challenges me as an artist, as I have particular preferences in formal aesthetics. I have expectations of how the body “should” move, yet those movements may not result in a coherent performance and there is certain dance language which I am not familiar with. When embarking on a collaboration such as this, one must take a leap of faith with the collaborator. 

The temporality of Our Feet Are Always Younger than Our Heads could be linked to your use of an open-ended time span in the self-explanatory, ongoing performance Filing Down a Steel Bar Until a Needle is Made (2013– ). The latter is in a way an infinite work that is only marked by your physical limitations while the former is a temporality built between two bodies—you and the performer—and repeated methodologically over predetermined sets. How does futility fit into your relationship with temporality? 

The futility in temporality is a main theme in my practice. The idea of the passage of time being an illusion really opened up a new path for me.

In a way, I don’t see physical limitations as a boundary. I know there is a very definite constraint on my lifetime as well as the size of the metal bar; however, I tend to only see the micro tasks, which is in the daily ritual, or the infinite, which is an uncertainty of how far I can go with the piece. I think the object’s significance changes in relation to myself. It is sometimes almost like my body double. 

How do you use other human bodies in your performance?

Our Feet Are Always Younger than Our Heads was the first time I had engaged with another human body in my performance. In this work, I was treating the dancer’s body as a conceptual object and the movement of the dancer is part of how the notion of the concept is flourishing. 

From my experience, when I am working with someone else, the sense of control of another body needs to be loosened. This gap between expectation and fulfilment actually created possibilities for Our Feet, even if, ultimately, we decided not to take that in the final presentation. I think this process also exists when I am working on my own performance or choreographing other objects, but my role as an artist and as a viewer is constantly shifting.

How do you negotiate the relationship between time, your body, and landscape?

I immediately think about how a performance, or the video documentation of a performance, records a geographical shift in my own artistic practice. For example, Plus-Minus-Zero (2010) was performed in Sapporo during my residency there, while Demolishing Rumor (2010) was created against the backdrop of the Caochangdi artist village in Beijing. Filing Down a Steel Bar Until a Needle is Made is essentially a snapshot of time when the metal bar and I were located at the SeMA NANJI Residency in Seoul in late 2015. These are also ways of showing the passage of time as well.