Wong Kit Yi works at the intersection of speculative imagination and research. Merging video with performance and the everyday, she crafts participatory experiences that engender questions of identity, the parameters of time and context. In her relational karaoke-lecture-performances, she moves fluidly between the voices of academia, memoir, philosophy and song, aggregating content from her research. A recent work commissioned for the FRONT Triennial 2022,
Inner Voice Transplant (2022), takes as its starting point the history of a voice box transplant, first performed at the Cleveland Clinic in 1998, and from there explores a braided narrative of medicine, spirituality and consciousness. She was recently commssioned by The Kitchen in New York to present a new project in 2024.
Wong Kit Yi graduated from the department of fine arts at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and received an MFA in sculpture from Yale University and has been teaching courses at State University of New York at Purchase and other universities on video art, performance, installation and sculpture. She has performed and shown work at The Kitchen, New York; M+, Hong Kong; Tate Modern, London; Queens Museum, New York; Para Site, Hong Kong; Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong; and the San Francisco Art Institute, California. She has participated in the Arctic Circle expeditionary residency (2015) and was a 2021-22 artist-in-residence at the Chinati Foundation, where she lived in a house full of infamously uncomfortable furniture designed by Donald Judd. Her work has been collected by M+ Museum, Hong Kong; Kadist Art Foundation, Paris/San Francisco; and Ackland Art Museum, North Carolina; among others.
📍 Currently On View 📍
Wong Kit Yi: DIAL 432 TO SEE THE LIGHT (with Kitchen archive-inspired notes on TV funerals, bagpipes, traveling tape, hidden frequencies, and more), The Kitchen Video Viewing Room, New York
Selected Writings / Reviews
Art in America
Review of FRONT International 2022 and Wong Kit Yi's artwork Inner Voice Transplant
Art21
How Can a Promise Stimulate Innovation? Interview with Wong Kit Yi
LEAP Magazine
Hera Chan's response to Magic Wands, Batons and DNA Splicers by Wong Kit Yi
ArtReview
Review of “Futures, Again,” P!, New York
The New York Times
Roberta Smith on “Bringing the World Into the World," Queens Museum, New York