Inner Voice Transplant explores the links between subjects as disparate as ancient Egyptian practices of dream interpretation; jiāngshī (Chinese hopping vampires); and the first voice-box transplant, which took place at the Cleveland Clinic in 1998. These inquiries are connected through her signature video essay mode, which incorporates newly composed songs with karaoke-style running subtitles into associative, essayistic narratives. This novel format opens up the videos to viewers’ embodied interactions, something expanded further by her live presentation of a karaoke performance-lecture during FRONT 2022’s opening days, and then at Tate Modern in London as well as M+ Museum in Hong Kong. 

The artist has also made a traveling kit that allows other art venues around the world to present a version of the project. 

As the artist states, “Ancient temples were the precursors of hospitals, places where body and spirit were meant to be treated together. Modern medicine, however, appears to divorce the concept of treatment from care of the soul.” In her thoroughly interdisciplinary approach, the perceived separation between bodies of knowledge and types of experience are broken down and imagined anew. In the spaces between established genres, Wong considers the question of illness and the need for some to simply live with it rather than heal in the way we are often commanded to do.

About the Artist

Wong Kit Yi lives and works between New York and Hong Kong. Her works have been included in recent projects organized by M+ (Hong Kong, 2023); Tate Modern (London, 2023); FRONT Triennial (Cleveland, 2022); Tai Kwun Contemporary (Hong Kong, 2021); Public Art Fund (New York, 2020); Para Site (Hong Kong, 2019). She was a resident in the Chinati Foundation Artist in Residence program (Marfa, 2021) and received an MFA from Yale University. She has taught university courses about performance, video art, and new media and currently teaches at the School of Visual Arts (New York) in the MFA Fine Arts program. Even when not teaching, she can’t quit lecturing people and continues to do so in her signature karaoke-inspired lecture format. Wong is currently preparing for a new commission by the Lahore Biennial 03, as well as a co-commission by LIAF 2024 (which is the longest-running art biennial in Scandinavia) and The Kitchen (New York). 

This exhibition is made possible by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Allen Whitehill Clowes Charitable Foundation, Efroymson Family Fund, Institute of Museum and Library Services, Ruth Arts, and The Arts Council of Indianapolis and City of Indianapolis.