Plus-Minus-Zero, 2010
Video HD, 3' 07"
Para/Site, Hong Kong, China
Morgan Wong’s exploration is a time performance reminiscent of Back To The Future scientific logics. As video is frequently categorized as time based media, this work connects time, distance, technology and travel. Whilst this work is related to a fax work that was commissioned for the exhibition FAX, and shown at Para/Site Art Space, it is also a perfectly autonomous work through the discourse it
holds. When we see the artist walking backwards and anti-clockwise, in order to reverse time, and turn the “clock” back 56 minutes and 6 seconds, we can only reflect on the pointless attempt of traveling through time, and in the process bring closer Hong Kong and Sapporo, by vanishing the time difference between the two places. The selection of an outdoor location is not random, it places us in a landscape, and this allows us to position the artist in the white countryside of Sapporo, in Japan, where this video has been produced. As a complex physics theory, where you only grasp the skin of it, this video is constructed with multiple mechanics. Is the artist really walking backwards?
We can see the other skiers passing by following the “right” direction. Why is snow going backwards as well? The simple poetics of a rambler in a white landscape is turned around, through the process of reframing time by symbolically pressing the fast-forward or the return button. It is through all these contradictions and collisions between technology, brain logics, time, optical illusions, distance and travel that
the artist builds this reflection.
Text by Alvaro Rodriguez Fominaya, Curator, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (then-curator at Para/site Art Space, Hong Kong)
Morgan Wong Portfolio, Feb 2013
Morgan Wong
Morgan Wong was born in 1984 in Hong Kong. He studied at Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. Winner of the Silver Award in the 2008 Awards Independent Film and Video Hong Kong, Wong has exhibited throughout Asia in the Para/Site Art Space Central (Hong Kong), 2P Contemporary Art Gallery (Hong Kong); Oyoyo Art Center (Sapporo); Videotage (Hong Kong), and internationally in Sao Paulo (18 Videobrasils), London (Turbine Hall, Tate Modern), Turin (Turin Palace Museum), Sapporo (Sapporo Museum Archive). Wong has conducted talks in Art Basel 43 (Basel, 2012); UCCA (Beijing, 2010). He currently lives and works in London.