“Mo Kong: Personal Ark”

YoU Exhibition

By Mo Kong

October 2, 2021

In their presentation for the Year of Uncertainty, Artist-In-Residence Mo Kong takes us into the not-so-distant future, introducing New Yorkool®, a fictional Asian immigrant-owned consulting firm that offers survival solutions to Americans post-ecological collapse. Emerging among the eerily familiar circumstances of environmental disaster and unprecedented economic and trade isolation, New Yorkool® capitalizes on vulnerable populations suffering from a lack of basic resources. Here in New York, residents are experiencing the hottest winter in history, and have limited access to locally produced fresh foods. New Yorkool® fulfills demand with its new-found methods, and in the process exploits the most basic insecurities of our systems, and the ravaging inequities that emerge from their failures.

Personal Ark inhabits parts of the Flushing Meadows Corona Park-facing entryway and one of the museum’s main galleries, where a central sculpture, growing over the course of the exhibition timeframe, showcases these innovations. Its contents and the surrounding installation incorporate narrative, branding, and sculpture, with purchased, found, and cultivated organic matter. Scent is particularly highlighted, drawing from research on the history of xenophobia and culturally-linked odors. Together this multisensory experience, reveals the dystopian intersection of capital, climate change and biopiracy, global migration, and self-identification that marks our present as much as our imminent future.

Window display housing a two sided graph board with dried fruits on the floor below. Adjacent to the window display is a glass door with overlay text reading “New Yorkool”. Additional text describes Mo Kong’s imagined dystopian future.
Caption: Installation view documenting stages of development from October to December 2021, Mo Kong: Personal Ark, Queens Museum. Photo credit: Hai Zhang.
Image Description: Window display housing a two sided graph board with dried fruits on the floor below. Adjacent to the window display is a glass door with overlay text reading “New Yorkool”. Additional text describes Mo Kong’s imagined dystopian future.
Caption: Installation view documenting stages of development from October to December 2021, Mo Kong: Personal Ark, Queens Museum. Photo credit: Hai Zhang.
Image Description: In an orange hue room, angular structures form an upwards trend graph. Short hourglass shaped lamp wrapped with seaweed sits on the floor at the bottom left of the image next to the first angular structure. A hanging lamp made of stacked glass vases wrapped in seaweed hangs from the top of the image. 
In an orange hue room, angular structures form a downwards trend graph. A hanging lamp made of stacked glass vases wrapped in seaweed hangs from the top of the image.
Caption: Installation view documenting stages of development from October to December 2021, Mo Kong: Personal Ark, Queens Museum. Photo credit: Hai Zhang.
Image Description: In an orange hue room, angular structures form a downwards trend graph. A hanging lamp made of stacked glass vases wrapped in seaweed hangs from the top of the image.
Black angular structures of varying heights in an orange hued room. Woman sits on the first angular structure. A lit glass lamp hangs from the top of the image.
Caption: Installation view documenting stages of development from October to December 2021, Mo Kong: Personal Ark, Queens Museum. Photo credit: Hai Zhang.
Image Description: Black angular structures of varying heights in an orange hued room. Woman sits on the first angular structure. A lit glass lamp hangs from the top of the image.
Boiling flask filled with dried foliage sits on the left of the image attached to an assortment of laboratory glassware filled with red liquid. On the right side is an emu egg wrapped in seaweed, human spine bone, and a conch shell hanging from a metal structure. A glass vessel in the lower right corner of the image contains a brewing mist.
Caption: Installation view documenting stages of development from October to December 2021, Mo Kong: Personal Ark, Queens Museum. Photo credit: Hai Zhang.
Image Description: Boiling flask filled with dried foliage sits on the left of the image attached to an assortment of laboratory glassware filled with red liquid. On the right side is an emu egg wrapped in seaweed, human spine bone, and a conch shell hanging from a metal structure. A glass vessel in the lower right corner of the image contains a brewing mist.

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