MO KONG: PLEASE BE THE WORLD YOU PROMISED TO BE
September 23 – November 25, 2017
Artericambi Gallery
Via Leida 6/A, 37135
Verona, Italy
SARAHCROWN is pleased to present ‘Please Be the World You Promised to Be’, a site-specific installation and overall transformation of ARTERICAMBI Gallery by Chinese artist Mo Kong. This exhibition represents Kong’s first solo exhibition in Europe. The exhibition features large video installations, as well as a series of multi-media works, sculptures, paintings, and drawings.
Mo Kong is among the most of adroit observers of China’s industrialized, globalized, and heavily censored condition. His practice describes with uncommon precision the influence local politics have on geology, sociology and architecture in China and the resulting destruction of nature, social and emotional traumas, and negative effects on the human psyche. Furthermore, Kong’s works visually elaborate the role and responsibility mass media and journalism have while falsely reporting- about these issues.
The video installation ‘See, Sun, and Think The Shadow’ (2016) represents the centerpiece of the exhibition and addresses the anxiety mining gave to the artist himself. A digital collage of existing footage, video animations, and sounds and symbols from our social media culture merge into a carousel of fictional and nonfictional data, similar to a navigation through a video game. “The constant mining process, landscape destruction, and sinkholes everywhere brought me to think about the symbolism of holes and the meaning of filling holes, gaps, and mental/physical cracks. The work is a miniature of personal and emotional reaction to both the real and the virtual world. It projects the abuse of land, corruption, the government’s censorship, and environmental pollution in my personal life,” Kong states.
Two additional multi-media installations and a series of two-dimensional works complete this centerpiece and create an interconnected parkour for the visitor offering a plethora of visual metaphors for the hidden issues in that society. Inspired by real facts, footage from the internet, and personal interviews, Mo Kong used that material to build his work, mixing into it fictional elements, characters and imaginative solutions to the point where a distinction between reality and fiction becomes difficult and the emotional instability evident, thus leading us to the penultimate question: Can virtual identities on the internet represent, and more importantly, substitute political figures and systems?
About Mo Kong
Mo Kong is a multi-media artist and researcher currently residing in Brooklyn, New York. He received his MFA degree in Digital + Media from the Rhode Island School of Design.
Mo Kong’s work is deeply impacted by the social and political events of his homeland China. His body of work uses the visual language to describe those events and to build an emotional connection to the audience. Being political, but not an activist, his works takes on a very personal direction, and the materials he works with embody the nature of each subject he deals with.
