Morrison Gong

Lives and works in New York, NY

Artist statement

Photographs are the oracle bones of the modern age. In ancient China, oracle bones materialized communion with the divine. Photographs do the same: they document literal and constructed realities while pressing against the cosmological forces behind the surface. My practice moves through photography, performance, moving image, and writing. I invoke the body as a site of haunting, wounding, conjuring, and mythmaking. Across photographs of ritual performances, large-scale collages that place contemporary women's bodies within imperial burial architecture, and videos connecting hereditary disease to geographical landscape, I collapse the personal, historical, and metaphysical into the same terrain. Drawing from Chinese divination and funerary rites, I create mythologies in which ancestors, animals, and the cosmic circulate beyond the linearity of life and death. I photograph to conjure—to reach my dead lover, my bloodline, and my origin across the seams of time. Animism and polytheistic traditions guide my thinking as living systems of knowledge. Through them, I trace how matrilineage, imperial history, and ecological phenomena carry death across borders into individual and political afterlives of grief.

Artwork