Qu Chang
March, 2024
This essay takes the form of diary entries and excerpts of texts by Judith Butler and Roland Barthes as a means of signaling the multiple lives and intersubjectivity that mourning evokes, similar to what Isaac Chong Wai has explored in his performances since the mid-2010s. Mourning constantly requests the indication of time for those lost in the struggle between “bringing memory to the past” and “bringing past to memory” (David L. Eng and David Kazanjian). Accordingly, instead of organizing these disjointed entries in chronological order, I have pieced together the mourning of different people in disparate times and places, narrating the stories of loss as a connecting and communal event. A single assault, moments of civil unrest, and the collective falling and rising in Isaac’s body of work come together with other accounts of grievances, suggesting the fragmentary yet reoccurring experiences of loss that are both historical and present, personal and shared. Mourning as a politically engaged activity, like Isaac suggests through his practice, entails a series of physical actions that are at once sorrowful, persistent, vulnerable, and vigorous.