Wong Kit Yi “Futures, Again”

P!

This event has ended.

Once upon a time, there was a gallery called K. that lived in the storefront at 334 Broome Street where P! now stands. Its third exhibition, in Spring 2015, was by an artist named Wong Kit Yi.

Her project, North Pole Futures, focused on an idiosyncratic financial, legal, and social proposition: the show offered intrepid collectors a chance to commission the artist to create a customized artwork at the North Pole. By selecting a color, an unusual word, and a specific date, each commissioner established a conceptual prompt for their individual piece, which Wong Kit Yi promised to complete during her upcoming Arctic residency. Based upon trust, the artist’s “futures” represented a unique bond between patron and performer, reflecting both the fixity and fickle uncertainty of the North Pole.

Now, Futures, Again at P! picks up where North Pole Futures left off. Wong presents here the multi-faceted results from her 20-day Arctic voyage in October 2015. Seven performance-based photographic works, commissioned during the last exhibition, are exhibited publicly for the first time. In addition, ephemeral materials keyed to each day of her North Pole trip are arranged as a physical calendar in the gallery, serving as scores for future actions. Her new film, A River in the Freezer, combines directed and found footage to meditate upon glacial memory, cryogenics, and frozen fiction. Disparate subjects—ranging from Longyearbyen, Norway (a town where no one is allowed to die), the fair-haired manga character Cygnus Hyōga, 19th-century global trading in ice, and color wavelength theory, among others—are synthesized within a karaoke-inspired sing-along format. Together, this body of past and future works represents the newest chapter of an ongoing project.

As the Arctic melts, we wait for what will come next.

Wong Kit Yi is a Hong Kong-born artist based in New York. Her conceptual and performance-based work animates human interactions by measuring, locating, and quantifying the intangible. Recent solo shows include Sandwich Theory: convertible painting series, a.m. space, Hong Kong (2016); and North Pole Futures, K., New York (2015). Her projects have been included in group exhibitions such as Not Treasure, Not Trash, West Bund Art Center, Shanghai (2016); regarding lightness: On Life’s Way, Oil Street, Hong Kong (2015); Bringing the World into the World, Queens Museum, New York (2014); The Ceiling Should Be Green, P!, New York (2013); and EXCHANGE, School 33 Art Center, Baltimore (2013). Wong’s work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Art in America, e-flux conversations, Asian Art News, The Art Newspaper, China Daily, and Modern Painters. In 2015, Wong participated in an Arctic Circle Expeditionary Residency with partial support from the Jerome Foundation. She received her MFA from Yale University in 2012.