At a moment when the vocabulary of visibility feels both urgent and exhausted, Isaac Chong Wai approaches the body as an instrument of memory and resistance. The Berlin-Hong Kong artist, who has shown internationally, including recently at the 14th Taipei Biennial, Whispers on the Horizon, works across glass, photography, video, drawing and performance to trace the emotional afterlives of global phenomena – anti-Asian violence, queer precarity and diasporic longing. His installations often begin in observations or cinematic myth and end in something disarmingly intimate: a gesture held too long, a mirrored surface marked by breath, choreography that turns vulnerability into quiet defiance. In 2025, Chong completed a six-month residency in New York under the Désirée and Hans Michael Jebsen Fellowship, supported by the Asian Cultural Council. The city’s contradictions, where its celebrated freedoms coexist with persistent segregation and economic strain, sharpened his enquiry into solidarity, heroism and the fragile architectures that hold marginalised bodies in public space. Jessica Wan: What was the starting point of your fieldwork in New York? How did the city reshape or sharpen the …