studio interview_Poyen Wang x Isaac Chong Wai
Fall 2025 open call studio artist Poyen Wang chats with artist and ACC fellow Isaac Chong Wai at 99 Canal
10NOV2025 As part of our Fall 2025 Studio Open Call program, we presented Poyen Wang’s Night Stroll installation at 99 Canal and invited the artist to be in conversation with Isaac Chong Wai, a visiting New York artist fellow with the Asian Cultural Council.
In the days following the presentation we held a private, in-studio interview between Poyen and Isaac, whose work Falling Reversely, presented at the 60th Venice Biennale, opened resonant connections between the two practices.
Poyen, your moving image presentation at 99 Canal contains these shifting rhythms and flashing images that make time itself feel unstable. What led you to choose these flashing, visual patterns?
Poyen Wang (PW): When I was creating Night Stroll, I thought a lot about time. I was thinking how can I queer time in this moving image work?
For the strobing section, particularly, I was trying to experiment with time because first, I think that format was trying to recall the experience of queer cruising. At the same time, because this character was placed in a home environment, cruising in a familiar place is made surreal and unusual. The whole idea is converting this intimate space into an unfamiliar place, and then, in terms of the creative decisions, you see both the camera moving forward, and you hear the audio of a count down. It’s linear because the camera movement is always moving forward. But I wanted to use the count down to make the viewer feel the opposite - a sense of backward motion, making them feel disoriented with the sense of time. The work counts down from 10 to zero, but nothing really happens at the end. So there is no resolution. And then there’s the flash you speak about: an image, and then darkness, image and darkness - I didn’t really think too much about it. For me, it’s very fragmented, and I use the darkness to give the audience some breathing space, but also in a way to use these techniques to connect all the fragments and negative space in a moving image work.
When you [Isaac] first started making art, did you think about queerness as a starting point, or did it naturally become part of the work through your lived experiences?
Isaac Chong Wai (ICW): For me, art has to be queer. Otherwise, why would we just repeat or reinforce the normative approaches that are given for granted? There’s a reason we make contemporary art. This connects directly to what Poyen mentioned about the sense of familiarity. What interests me is how to transform it into something unfamiliar.
I think what your question is really touching on is the tone, texture, and sensibility of how the works are presented. There is a certain kind of subtlety that runs through both of our practices. Coming from an East Asian background, the experience of growing up shapes this sensibility - not necessarily through overt statement or visible resistance, but through restraint, hesitation, and quiet shifts in how bodies, gestures, and relationships are negotiated.
Great question. How would you [Poyen] describe the shared sensibility in your work that feels both queer and marked by a sense of foreignness, especially as it relates to the body and the spaces you inhabit? And how does this sensibility connect to the diasporic experience of moving from your hometown, Taipei, Taiwan, to the West and navigating intimate domestic spaces that no longer feels fully your own?
PW: For me, when I create work, I’m trying to think about what I want to do, and then of course, who am I? That’s the question I like to ask. Who am I? How does the world relate to me?
I feel like making Moving Image art gives me more freedom to explore these kinds of ideas in comparison to traditional film making. Maybe queering is part of it, but I think it’s more complex.
I’m more interested in contradictory ideas because this is how I feel most of the time, as who I am, as a queer person, as a male, as an immigrant. So in the work, I think there’s a lot of things I want to play with, this sort of contradictory idea coexisting, like being familiar and unfamiliar, being foreign and domestic, being private and public, being queer and acting conforming to mainstream society, to deal with the masculinity that I still feel from time to time.
When I created the voice in my work, I’m always trying to answer my own existential questions like what I’m constantly dealing with as a queer person.
What you mentioned is Asian men are usually considered more feminine, and if I want to appear more masculine, am I falling into the canon of Western homosexual stereotypes of ideology? But it’s always something I feel that is never truly resolved.
This is what I try to evoke in my work, I don’t want to provide a defined identity. So especially in “Night Stroll”, you see this character whose voice is both feminine and kind of devilish. And for me, the voice always provides some kind of identity. I decided to make the characters speak in a way that you can distinctly tell if it’s more feminine or more masculine, so these “contradictions” can coexist in the same character. When I create a world, the most important thing is to answer my own questions. And so this is why, in my work, I intentionally combine my own lived experience or my autobiography. But I also fictionalize a lot through taking inspiration from cinema and literature.
I come from a very small town in Taiwan, so when I went to Taipei, I realized what is homosexuality and how you can accept yourself as a queer person. And I remember, at the time, I read this novel written by Pai Hsien-yung called Crystal Boys. They were talking about a queer community in the 80s in Taipei particularly. And there’s a chapter where they talk about this park in Taipei called “Two Two Eight Park,” where people go for cruising. When I was in Taipei studying, cruising was not really a thing anymore, because there’s already the internet, but
I was a very young queer person in a foreign city. I went to the park to experience it and try to imagine myself in the literature.
Another influence of my work is cinema. So in my work, I think that’s a strategy I’m using, similar to how I familiarized queer experiences through fictional lens. I let the audience know that I believe we project ourselves into those fictional worlds and then eventually come back to our own lived experience.
How do the paradoxes in your [Isaac] work - between East and West, queer and straight, and other binaries shaped by Western thinking - inform both your sense of self-discovery and the way you’ve situated your performances within a pristine, white gallery space?
ICW: People often go into that bit about queerness. I find it quite interesting. For this particular work, it was about how systemic violence is already here, everywhere, to a point that it actively produces injured bodies. You can trace this back to moments when, for example, a queer person in a public space might get attacked. I remember when Asian hate was on the rise, I was attacked on the street. It made me question why these experiences and even the potential for them become a kind of default condition. And I keep asking myself: are there any ways to resist against this?
During the planning of [the Venice presentation], the curator Adriano Pedrosa, commissioned the work to be developed for the Biennale. And I remember he said it had to be placed in the middle of the exhibition, so that people cannot miss it - you have to confront it.
One last thing, pose a question you wish you were asked more often?
ICW: A friend of mine once asked me a question that I still remember clearly. Monique Burger asked: “what is your dream project?” From my experience, if you truly believe in that dream, others will believe in that too. Then you will find ways to make it happen.
PW: For me, similar to what Isaac just said, maybe I will ask myself, do you know when you’ll make your last piece of work? Do you think there will be a last piece of artwork you make?
You know, will there be an ending and you don’t have to create more artwork?Or do you think there won’t be a so-called the last piece? I think that’s my question. For me as an artist, art is essentially considered an occupation, right? Will you retire? Or is it never retired? I think this is a question for myself.
Artist bios:
Poyen Wang is an artist and filmmaker born and raised in Taiwan, currently based in New York City. His recent work approaches image-making as a theatrical endeavor, staging psychologically charged scenes to explore intimacy, vulnerability, and power dynamics. Wang’s work has recently been shown at Asia Art Archive in America, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Wassaic Project, Essex Flowers, Kunstmuseum Bonn, and Kasseler Kunstverein, among others. He is a recipient of LMCC’s Manhattan Arts Grants and has participated in residencies and fellowships at Triangle Arts Association, the AIM Fellowship,18th Street Arts Center, and Flux Factory.
Isaac Chong Wai is a Berlin–Hong Kong artist whose practice spans glass, drawing, photography, video, and performance to explore contemporary global phenomena. His work transforms emotions, tensions, and memories of human interactions into immersive, performative forms, engaging queer identity, Asian diasporic histories, and systemic racism to imagine alternative relational microcosms. He has exhibited at the Venice Biennale, Taipei Biennial, Biennale of Videobrasil, Neue Nationalgalerie, MMCA Seoul, and Liste Art Fair Basel. His works are in Hamburger Bahnhof, Kadist, White Rabbit, and Burger Collection. He received the Jebsen Fellowship and was named a Top 100 cultural figure in Berlin in 2024.
Studio Program | 99 Canal
The Winter 2026 Open Call is open NOW! Apply by December 30.
Our Studio Program facilitates three private, professional studios (350–800 sq ft), offered to artists of all disciplines through one to three-month residencies on a rotating basis. We’ve found that individuals developing personal projects in New York, engaging with our neighborhood, and proposing initiatives for our public programs tend to gain the most from the residency. During their time at 99 Canal, artists are invited to take part in community-driven activities such as our ‘in conversation’ series, artist lunches, and open studios.