Breath Marks: Mother with Her Dead Son, 2022
Isaac Chong Wai
Archival print, Etching on glasses, 14 panels, wooden base
Commissioned by ifa-Galerie Berlin
Photo by Victoria Tomashiko and Chroma Istanbul
Print: 160 x 120cm
Glass: 40 x 30 x 1 cm each
Wooden base: 43 x 30 x 3 cm
In Breath Marks: Mother with Her Dead Son (2022), Chong shifts from the contemporary to the historical, creating another set of “breath-painting” photographic print and glass sculpture depicting an abstracted image of the sculpture Pieta by German expressionist artist Käthe Kollwitz. Kollwitz created the sculpture in 1937 to 1939 to pay tribute to her son who was killed in World War I; an enlarged version of the sculpture currently sits within Neue Wache, Berlin’s national memorial for the victims of war and tyranny. Chong channels the moving pathos of Kollwitz by using his breath mark as a paint brush, delineating the contours of her sculpture. Painted with an intangible material, an extension of the artist’s body, Chong gives form to the fragility of life, while staging a moving protest against the atrocity of wars, past and present.
Transferring the collective mourning experienced on a national scale to the maternal grief of an individual, Chong questions the slippage between the mother figure of the nation state and motherly love in family kinship. In Breath Marks: Mother with Her Dead Son (2022), Chong shifts from the contemporary to the historical, creating another set of “breath-painting” photographic print and glass sculpture depicting an abstracted image of the sculpture Pieta by German expressionist artist Käthe Kollwitz. Kollwitz created the sculpture in 1937 to 1939 to pay tribute to her son who was killed in World War I; an enlarged version of the sculpture currently sits within Neue Wache, Berlin’s national memorial for the victims of war and tyranny. Chong channels the moving pathos of Kollwitz by using his breath mark as a paint brush, delineating the contours of her sculpture. Painted with an intangible material, an extension of the artist’s body, Chong gives form to the fragility of life, while staging a moving protest against the atrocity of wars, past and present.