Wong Kit Yi

Embedded, 2024

Working with three local female directors and three local actors on three video edits, Wong Kit Yi’s karaoke lecture Embedded explores the relationship between fertility and social ecology in Pakistan and other parts of Asia that are already experiencing the direct effects of the climate crisis. Excessive heat negatively affects male and female fertility, which seems to be a distressing fact on a warming planet that should prompt urgent action. Meanwhile, anti-natalist philosophers, who believe that having children is immoral, cite continuing human responsibility for climate change as one of the reasons we should stop reproducing. In this logic, Wong ponders the possibility that reducing human fertility through rising temperature is the Earth’s means to regulate its own heat levels. 

Ranging over expansive phenomena relating to heat and fertility, Wong’s work further divigates into ideas of ancient Chinese ceramic pillows as a potentially valuable cooling technology, and the concept of the bed and its function in both biology and culture. Throughout such explorations, she incorporates vital elements from Womanifesto’s Procreation/Postcreation project in 2023. This is Wong’s first project in Pakistan.

Wong Kit Yi (b.1983) is a Hong Kong artist who works at the intersection of speculative imagination and research. In her relational karaoke-lecture-performances, she moves fluidly between the voices of academia, memoir, philosophy, and song, aggregating content from her research. Wong has been commissioned to make works for FRONT Triennial in Cleveland and Kitchen in New York, and her work has been performed in projects organized by M+ in Hong Kong, Tate Modern in London, Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art in Riga, and more.