Chicago: Kongkee
By Maria Romanova
KONGKEE and DRAGON’S DELUSION WORKSHOP, Qu Yuan, Dragons’s Delusion-Assasination, 2018, still from video: 10 min 37 sec. Copyright the artist. Courtesy the artist and Penguin Lab.
As visitors explored the third and fourth floors of Wrightwood 659, they were transported to the distant past of the Warring States Period (c. 481–221 BCE) that was aesthetically diffracted through the fabric of a speculative future. Drawing on Asian Futurism, a trend that foregrounds artistic work by Asian and diasporic producers, the exhibition was a creative reconfiguration of the life of a key figure in Chinese history and literature, the poet Qu Yuan (c. 339–278 BCE), which constructed a vision of an alternative future that is simultaneously dystopian and hopeful, but also ambivalent, haunted by pessimism and uncertainty. The question that lingered on my mind as I walked through the phantasmagorical display of multiscreen videos, neon installations, wall projections, excerpts from graphic novels, ancient Chinese objects, and textual works was: If this installation draws on historical figures to imagine an alternative future, what kind of futurity is desired here? And how is Kongkee using the affectual trace of the historical past to provide a critical account of the ideological landscape of the present moment?
