WONG KIT YI: +852 GHOST-JPG

Driving along Highway 17 to Marfa, Texas, spectators have for many years reported seeing strange lights in the sky. Described as fuzzy glowing tufts, colored cirrus streaks, or giant luminous spheres, these lights often materialize at random but are curiously active: they can catch viewers off guard, flying at high speed, or float away, distant, and aloof 🌌.

Known as the Marfa Lights, or Marfa Ghost Lights, the phenomenon has birthed dozens of conspiracy theories, from benevolent aliens 🛸 and oracular spirits to car reflections 🚘 and static electricity in the arid deserts. The true cause of their existence appears almost inconsequential; our fixation with these visions seems less about the lights themselves, and more about our desire to touch the ineffable.

In 2022, Hong Kong artist Wong Kit Yi embarked on a residency at The Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, where she discovered the Marfa Lights while researching the archives of Donald Judd. Looking at Judd’s freestanding sculptures ⬛ and his collection of bagpipe recordings within Marfa’s drifting sands and lights, miles away from her hometown of Hong Kong, the artist began to dig into the layers of the paranormal, bewitched by the relationship between the visible and invisible, and the tangible and intangible spaces that surround us.

The title of the exhibition “+852 GHOST-JPG” is at once a reference to the nostalgic act of dialing phonewords and Wong’s explorations into other realms—the “+852” alluding to both Hong Kong’s area code and a particular sound frequency said to open one’s third eye 👁️. Challenging Brakhage’s “eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective,” the artist moves toward the paranormal layers that make up our visual experience, upending ideas of the earthly and the singular. As the visitor enters the exhibition, a simulacrum of a living room—a domestic space in which television 📺 is traditionally watched, and paintings 🖼️ are looked at—becomes an arena of spectral entertainment. Doors and sofas are multiplied; a series of “paintings” mirror each other; the double-sided video screen has no clear back or front. The visitor also becomes enmeshed in this expanded video installation, walking through the rooms like a character in a sequence of near-identical frames 🚶🏻‍♀️🚶🏻‍♀️🚶🏻‍♀️.

Reaching Wong’s video work in the central space, Dial 432 to See the Light (2022-24), the viewer is invited to sit on the circular, sandy sofas, and temporarily mimic a non-moving object (or a West Texas desert cactus 🌵). In front of them, moving images and words ruminate on the various research elements that fueled the exhibition: graveyards, angel numbers, hidden frequencies, Hong Kong’s colonial-era TV funerals, ghost images 👻, Donald Judd, trash bagpipes, and the railroad workers who worked on Marfa’s train tracks in the 1800s. By blending found documentary and home video-style clips and image stills, Wong references various modalities of video, cemented in her signature karaoke lecture performances: videos that feature running subtitles as seen in karaoke 🎤, combined with research elements typical of a lecture 👩🏻‍🏫, and the occasional song🎵.

In blurring the lines between the moving and non-moving, earth-bound truths and spiritual speculations, Wong presents an instability around our perceived realities. Two languages—English and traditional Chinese—are viewed in the subtitles, yet a third, largely untranslatable dialect of slang Cantonese can be heard over the speakers, disrupting the notion that languages and nations are fixed, stable, or even fully legible. A shorter companion video about Hong Kong, +852 OK-HOMER (2024), echoes the unresolved from a hidden space within the exhibition, suggesting that there are even more layers to uncover, and inviting visitors to dig a little deeper 🌌.