Isaac Chong’s Intimate Surrender

As a child, Isaac Chong Wai would fall asleep in the evenings while his parents watched films. He remembers straining to stay awake and take part in this adult routine, but he inevitably drifted off, waking the next morning with only hazy memories of what was on screen. 

One of the movies his parents had on rotation was Farewell My Concubine, the 1993 historical drama about a Peking opera troupe directed by Chen Kaige and adapted from the 1985 novel by Hongkonger Lilian Lee, who took the title and some inspiration from the classic Peking opera of the same name. Another Hongkonger, actor and singer Leslie Cheung, starred in one of the film’s three leading roles, alongside Gong Li and Zhang Fengyi. “Back then I didn’t know much about the film,” says Chong. “I was more captivated by the colour and the Chinese opera, the makeup.” 

Today, Chong has returned to Farewell My Concubine. The film is one of the major inspirations behind An Intimate Surrender, Chong’s current exhibition at Tai Kwun Contemporary, which features the artist and 10 dancers performing choreographed movements across two galleries. In the first room, the performers interact with each other and with boxy, two-level metal structures lined with glass panels. The second room is more intimate, with dimmer lighting and swathes of fabric draped from the ceiling. At different points in the show, the dancers touch, hold and caress each other, continuing Chong’s longstanding exploration of how physical closeness in performance art can spark conversations about community and identity. 

“When I got the invitation to do the live art commission at Tai Kwun, I first asked the question: what performance do I want to see in Hong Kong? What performance do I want to create in Hong Kong?” says Chong. Those questions led him to reflect on the life and work of Leslie Cheung, the local icon at the heart of Farewell My Concubine.

Leslie Cheung’s legacy

“To me, Leslie Cheung is a very important queer figure,” says Chong. “When I was growing up, being queer, he was one of the very few people who I could see how brave he is. He was kind of like a model I could look up to or follow. Of course, when I grew up, he had already passed away.” Cheung died by suicide on 1 April 2003 at the age of 46. When the news broke, it seemed so unbelievable that many fans dismissed it as an April Fool’s joke. 

As Chong’s interest demonstrates, Cheung’s tragic passing has not dimmed his influence. “His legacy and his performances still convey his emotions and power. If you are watching his movies or performances or singing a song by him, he’s still having a lasting impact.” 

While he was researching Cheung, Chong rewatched Farewell My Concubine one night with his partner. Seeing it as an adult, Chong realised that there were several themes running through the film that also underpin his art: the politics of the body; the physical, psychological and emotional impacts of trauma; how public and private decisions echo through the years; the vulnerability involved in forging connections with others; and the power of friendship and community. 

In short, Farewell My Concubine tells the story of a boy who is abandoned by his mother in 1920s Beijing and taken in by an opera troupe. He befriends another boy, and the two grow up to become opera stars. The boy, Cheng Dieyi, played by Cheung, performs female roles. His friend, Duan Xiaolou, plays the male lead. On stage, they play a general and his devoted concubine, mirroring Dieyi’s real-life and unrequited feelings for Xiaolou. The film follows their friendship for roughly 50 years, through the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Chinese Civil War and the Cultural Revolution.  

Performing gender

One of the things that most fascinated Chong during his rediscovery of Farewell My Concubine was how the film explores the performativity of gender. To give an example, when Cheung is playing a woman in the film, he uses the gesture of the ‘orchid hand’, bringing his middle finger and thumb together. In Peking opera, the movement is associated with grace, femininity and refinement, so it is often used in female roles. “He makes a hand gesture and immediately the vibe or the body is changed. It’s more soft, more feminine,” says Chong. 

Witnessing Cheung’s performance triggered childhood memories of being teased for unwittingly making similar movements. “People would laugh at me when I was a kid, if my little finger was a bit out. ‘Aha, you’re making the orchid hand! You’re such a woman!’” recalls Chong. “Now I’m turning this gesture that maybe I was ashamed of as a kid into something empowering.”

Chong also has a new perspective on the film because he has lived in Germany since 2013. “When I’m in Germany, if I do [the orchid hand], no one would know what it is,” says Chong. This made him consider how gender is performed differently across cultures. “I find it interesting when it comes to masculinity in Chinese [culture], we actually often refer to a poet. It’s not all about the muscles.” This speaks to the longstanding idea in China that the ideal man combines two archetypes of masculinity: the scholar (文 wén or man4) and the warrior (武 wǔ or mou5). 

While Chong’s personal experiences are threaded throughout the work, it is not meant to be interpreted as autobiographical. The abstract nature of the performance — there is no script or dialogue to help audiences decode the scenes — means that the movements are open to interpretation. In fact, Chong hopes to turn the attention away from himself and towards the visitors. He wants people to see themselves in the action, to reflect on how we all consciously or unconsciously perform gendered actions, so he has made the audience part of the production.

In the spotlight

The focus on gallery-goers starts at the very beginning of the show. “When you first enter the space, there is a pile of spotlights pointing at you, as if you are entering a stage and you are the one who’s performing,” says Chong. 

In collaboration with the exhibition’s curator, Louiza Ho, Chong also decided not to put any barriers between the audience and the performers. There is no delineated stage. The performers are directly in front of you and you can walk right up to them. Placing everyone on the same level, in the same space, encourages gallery-goers to think of themselves as performers, and perhaps to question the roles they enact every day. 

“The film is very much between reality and performance. In the play, [Cheung] fell in love with a man, then in real life he fell in love with the same man,” says Chong. “Is he living in a performance or reality? How to merge them together was an important reference point for me when making this piece.” 

The idea that reality might echo a performance, or vice versa, is reinforced by the fact that some of the dancers’ sequences are repeated. The choreography is cyclical, just as fiction and life can be. Spinning is one action that recurs throughout the show, echoing a climactic moment from the film, which itself draws on the fact that spinning your body or a prop is a key skill in Chinese opera. Other repeated movements include hand gestures, sometimes as performers reach out to each other, and performers’ heads being pushed together, which again recreates a key scene from Farewell My Concubine. 

Witnessing these moments of physical connection inspired strong responses from audience members during the exhibition’s opening weekend. “Some were crying,” says Chong. “Showing something intimate, just a hug or [dancers] putting their heads together, for the audience can remind them of the intimacy they have with their friends or partner or family.

Art mirrors life 

Another feature that helps audiences connect with the work is that the metal scaffolding in the first gallery is partly mirrored, so visitors literally see themselves reflected in the show. At certain times and from particular angles, a reflection might frame you in a scene with the performers. 

These structures are Chong’s latest creations incorporating glass. Last year, he unveiled two new series of glass works at Blindspot Gallery in Wong Chuk Hang. The first of these, Missing Space, is a group of abstract glass forms cast from traces of the Battle of Hong Kong in 1941, including bullet holes such as those on Stephen, one of the lion sculptures outside the HSBC Building in Central. For the second, Touched: Rouge, Chong used imprints of his own body to reenact scenes from the 1987 Hong Kong film Rouge, a romantic drama-turned-ghost story directed by Stanley Kwan and starring Anita Mui and, once again, Cheung. Chong then etched the imprints into the glass, immortalising ghostly impressions of the characters, their performance and the film. 

Chong has revisited that technique at Tai Kwun: on some of the glass panels set within the metal frames, he has etched marks left by performers who recreated scenes from Farewell My Concubine. 

“I think it’s the fragility of glass that drew me to the material,” says Chong. The fragility of our bodies, relationships, societies and planet is a theme in much of Chong’s work, although he hopes it is not the defining feature. Instead, he wants his works to demonstrate how we can persevere despite our vulnerability. After the dancers’ choreographed tumbles at Tai Kwun, they get back up. During the performance, some of the men hold each other up as they contort their bodies, stopping them from falling to the ground. 

“[Everything] is fragile, but how can we come together with different people to protect each other or support each other?” says Chong. “Because we are fragile, we need solidarity. Because we are fragile, we come together.” 

An Intimate Surrender runs until 9 August 2026 at Tai Kwun Contemporary. Click here for more information.