In Isaac Chong Wai's newly commissioned performance Choreographing Gravity: Dance Rehearsal (2025), a dancer rehearses movements referencing artworks within a rotated rehearsal room, navigating between everyday life practices and a gravity altered by the spatial situation. Gravity, fundamental to our daily lives, shapes how we move, act, and relate to the world. Chong challenges this invisible force by reimagining it through a choreography that follows a different logic. This durational performance reinterprets the methods of Marina Abramović and the movement studies of Joseph Beuys through an embodied translation. While the rules of gravity are seemingly suspended and the rehearsal space tilts, the audience is invited to a disorientating experience of an unknown dance.
about the artist(s)
Isaac Chong Wai (b. 1990) is a Berlin Hong Kong based artist using glass, drawing, photography, video and performance as mediators to investigate contemporary global phenomena. His work transforms the emotions, tensions, and memories from human interactions into performative materiality and immersive experiences. Treading the line between the individual and the collective, he examines the vulnerability of the body and the inherent violence within social systems and historical traumas and imagines alternative microcosms of human relationality. Chong had his first German institutional solo exhibition, The End of Growth, at Museum Schloss Moyland under the direction of Dr. Antje-Britt Mählmann. Chong is a participating artist in the 60th Venice Biennale curated by Adriano Pedrosa and the 14th Taipei Biennial curated by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath. His works have gained recognition at prominent venues, including the Biennale of Videobrasil, São Paulo Bundeskunsthalle Bonn; MMCA, Seoul; IFFR, Rotterdam; MOCA Taipei; and M+, Hong Kong.
