Hot Coffee with Brooklyn-based Chinese photographer Morrison Gong
Morrison Gong is a queer, Brooklyn-based photographer and a visual poet. Through September 4th Gong in collaboration with KON.SEN.SUSS and Mateus Porto,Tony Wang, Xevi Aqeel has a pop-up show now at :iidrr an artist-run gallery and platform focusing on new media art and trendy cultures in Chinatown (162 Allen Street).
Favorite quote from this interview:“China is my biological mother. I have a love-hate relationship with her. I’m forever indebted to her for giving me life and for her rich culture and history. New York is my fairy godmother who introduces me to the wonder of experiments.” We also discussed how and why bodies are objectified and why mythology is still with us.
Nina: Imagine you are in your favorite coffee or tea spot. Where is it? What are you drinking? What are the three things you see right now?
Morrison: Usually, I grab a matcha latte on my way to my studio in Dumbo. It is a 15 minutes’ walk from my subway stop, Clark Street, to my studio on Jay Street. I’d finish my drink as I’m walking. The walk is very pleasant on a sunny day, I see a lot of tourists speaking different languages, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, you name it. I see people relaxing on the grass with their dogs. I see people hitting sandbags and sweating like crazy in a boxing gym near my building.
Morrison Gong, Bea in Hallway, 2024. 35mm negative
Nina: You are a queer artist from China who has been living in New York for the last few years. What prompted your decision to leave your homeland and did you find anything here you have searched for?
Morrison: I have been in New York since 2017, so seven years now. The most crucial and perhaps quite shallow reason why I left China was that the College Entrance Examination back home was brutal. The students give up all their joys of being teenagers preparing for this one exam. If you want to study art, you will go to painting camps where the only thing you do is learn how to paint still life and people as realistically as possible. The educational system there is corrupted and oppressive, and it bleeds into the way young people think. It was hard to find my community there. China is my biological mother. I have a love-hate relationship with her. I’m forever indebted to her for giving me life and for her rich culture and history. New York is my fairy godmother who introduces me to the wonder of experiments. She allows me to try on multiple identities for size and brings out my most creative self. Nobody gives a fuck if I make naked pictures of people, or if I’m into men, women, queer, trans, non-binary folx. The city’s compassion and inclusivity are incomparable.
Morrison Gong, Nicolás on Rails, 2023, 35mm negative
Nina: Photographing nude bodies is part of your practice. How is it different from objectifying bodies that you photograph?
Morrison: Frankly I’m not sure if photography can completely evade objectifying people as it literally turns a person into an image. What is within my control is that I can provide contexts of the relationships I cultivated with my sitters, whether it is in the details of the photos, or in my writing about the photos. Photography is my way of communing with the gods. I admire people as god’s creations, their beauties and flaws and everything. I have access to a very private aspect of others through portraying them nude and it often triggers lots of their emotions. The voyeur in me doesn’t get excited about nudity. It gets excited about people’s struggles and internal conflicts. They remind me that people are complex and multi-dimensional. I see myself in their stories and I realize we are more interconnected than we thought we were.
More recently, I have introduced a new practice of letting my models photograph me naked. I’ve always had a problem of how male photographers only take erotic photos of women but never pose nude themselves. Why is that okay? Where is the reciprocity? I think this mode of working reflects a larger problem of our society led by patriarchy, where all we think about is to exploit and dominate. Letting my subjects photograph me is my way of handing the power over.
Installation photo, courtesy of Morrison Gong and :iidrr gallery. August 28- September 4, 2024.
Nina: We live in a time when sexual impulses are far more implicit and sometimes too cheaply overt. Why do you think we need more of those? Where do you see yourself within this devaluation of images, eroticism, and sensuality?
Morrison: Yes, sex has become narcissistic and utilitarian nowadays, especially with the ubiquity of pornography. The art industry and the porn industry are both oversaturated. I don’t think we need any more photographs, or art, in general. But we don’t create out of what we think people need, we create out of our selfish instincts, whether for fame, for money, or to fill up the void in our souls.
I create because I want to articulate my desire to connect with the world at large. I don’t see my photographs as inherently sexy. They are more like experiments on relationships. However, eroticism feeds on all kinds of creative human activities, and it is impossible to separate them without destroying disciplines like photography. Our relationship with eroticism is more symbiotic because it fuels us to understand and contribute to the world around us. To create requires a third party and to masturbate only requires oneself. Eros humanizes us whereas pornography alienates us.
Morrison Gong,Eileen in Chinese Garden, 2023, 35mm negative.
Nina: From our earlier conversation I remember your interest in mythology. Why do you think mythology continues to be relevant today- does our global, planetary, uncertainty have something to do with it?
Morrison: Mythology showcases a full spectrum of human experience. In our gradually divisive world, literary archetypes like the trickster and the lover still connect cultures from all over the world. They are timeless. I also like that there’s no prohibition in mythical tales. They are filled with grotesque elements such as transformation, bestiality, cannibalism, rape, and murder, which I think are much more loyal depictions of human nature. On the other hand, there are also many mythical characters who are wise and selfless. In mythology, cruelty doesn’t exist in contradiction with beauty.
In our liberal far-left culture today, there is no middle ground between good and evil. We fail to acknowledge the complexity of the human mind. Literature and artworks are starting to placate their viewers by showing only what is morally acceptable. The truth is that we live in a relational world. Darkness exists in relation to light. Hero exists in relation to the villain. I’m a big advocate for non-dualistic thinking. Things are not inherently right or wrong. It just depends on whose perspective you’re taking. That’s the lesson that I’ve learned not only from mythology but also from history. There’s an all-encompassing pattern in the natural way of the universe, in Chinese Taoist philosophy it’s called “Dao,” a certainty within uncertainty. I’m interested in what remains unchanged throughout changes.
