Re-Visioning #4: A Conversation with Sunshine Wong
This is the fourth in a roving and open-ended series of conversations in the context of the interruption of everything by COVID-19. For me, in March 2020, I was about to set out on a 220 mile walk on foot, collecting and sharing acts towards and visions of a positive future society. In the deep uncertainty of the present moment, I find myself, like many others, embarking on different trajectories of unlearning, destabilizing and re-visioning. These conversations are part of that process. They begin through some convergence of ideas or space. Transcribing them is not making art but a way of temporarily living inside the ideas they contain, an act of deep listening. Publishing them is not exhibiting them but extending the invitation.
Sunshine Wong is an art writer, researcher, and facilitator. Her practice concerns the mediation and social production of contemporary art. Current interests include artmaking infrastructures, critical care approaches, and what it feels like to live in sick times. She is the Curator at Bloc Projects in Sheffield, Regional Editor (Yorkshire and Humberside) for Corridor 8, and irregularly convenes a “slow reading” group called TL;DR for anyone who has a complicated relationship with working in the arts.
IN: Sunshine, these conversations always start from a point of connection, and with you that was an Instagram post that you shared sometime during the first lockdown, in which you proposed the notion of co-vulnerability, or as you put ‘solidarity in being sick together’. I found it really valuable at the time, and it has become a touchstone for me, without really having a conversation about it with you. Back in the midst of another lockdown, it seemed like a good opportunity for us to go a bit deeper into that.
SW: I don’t have it worked out at all, so it does feel like a good opportunity to get it out there. I was reading ‘On Immunity’ by Eula Biss, which is about her research on vaccination, starting from the question of whether she wants to vaccinate her child. Around the same time I saw a scientist, Professor Medley, talking on the BBC, about the difference in how you relate to the world if you try to imagine yourself as transmitter rather than receiver of the virus. I grew up in very small spaces in Hong Kong, with everyone living on top of each other. It was really hard to find spaces just to be with yourself, and figure out where you end and the world begins. I no longer know in that first-person kind of way, but I still have strong ties there with loved ones. It’s an understanding of intimacy that is awfully familiar, one that’s in my bones. What that amounts to is a greater sense of vulnerability, a solidarity in being sick together, a co-vulnerability. In this country self-isolation means something very different, in terms of the physical space available. As a result of that, people seem to see themselves more readily as victim rather than monster.
IN: I clearly noticed a period in the second half of 2020, after the first lockdown, when people seemed to forget their potential for monsterhood, to continue with that metaphor. Most people didn’t continue to consider acutely the wider vulnerability of others in their daily actions. When we were discussing this conversation, one of the things that came up was that we both have young children and are trying to work through the various ways that they engage with the world, in terms of Covid.
SW: I’m just trying to think about what it means for my son to be growing up in sick times, how it feels to him, and how we will reflect on it. I’ve actually found it difficult and tiring to negotiate childcare spaces. Because the position that I occupy is more cautious than most, I’ve found that I have to keep exerting myself in order to make that clear to people. I also completely understand people wanting their children to play and touch, it’s just not where I’m at. Because if we don’t keep being cautious, the situation is just definitely going to worsen.
IN: There’s a bit in your original post where you pan out. Here it is, where you say “So in my mind i jump cut to the hardened brexit borders where national self-isolation is ok when you believe others are going to leech your resources; but self-isolation is not ok when you can’t move within your islands of work, leisure, friends and drink.” You go on to say “I’m just trying to get my head around this audacity”. Is this something to do with the denial of the relationship between one thing and the other? Is it the audacity to imagine that we can selectively control things way beyond our power and continue to behave as we want to? Or something else?
SW: I don’t know why the image comes to mind but I think of it in terms of starling murmurations, where the behaviour of an individual affects the crowd only slightly at first, but then exponentially as the movement spreads. I connect that to my sense growing up of not knowing where my individual body ends and the social body begins. If we always think of ourselves as these completely separate entities, it just seems much more difficult to me to comprehend what’s going on right now, not just in terms of the virus but also on a political level.
IN: I have started to think of co-vulnerability as a mirror of empowerment. Instead of this nonsensical and damaging notion that some people are powerful and others are not, until they are empowered by the powerful people, we might learn instead to share and inhabit vulnerability together as a way of being in the world. I like to imagine that our teachers in this endeavour might be those whose lives have been more vulnerable and uncertain than most of ours have up to this point, and that might represent a schism in terms of how we understand power and influence. But this is also why I wanted to have this conversation with you, because this is me running away with the idea, without really understanding where it originates for you.
SW: Going back a few years, I had a very long, arduous and difficult Phd thesis writing process. It slowly became evident to me that the approach I was taking, which was basically fronting myself with academic language, was breaking apart. All the language around that process was that of progress, strength and endurance. There were plenty of things wanted to reach, I knew they were there, but I couldn’t reach them. There was no space to dwell on things, or to break apart, which, going beyond thesis writing, is very much a part of life, right? It’s only really since then that I’ve allowed myself to experience those feelings and not just try to take the next step, do the next thing, move along. Everyone tells you that you will fester and fall apart, but sitting on something and staying with it requires self-reflection. The constant received urge to turn over and start a new page doesn’t make space for that. So I think that if we’re at all interested in societal change, we have to start looking at these things within ourselves that are quite hard and painful to take apart, like the option to not make progress. Even going backwards. If we’re always moving forward, so many things gets left behind. I’m interested in what those things might be.
IN: There’s something here, I think, that relates to the experience of lockdown. I went for a round walk this morning through the woods near my house, which is the same walk that I did most days during the first lockdown. As we do this circling and circling of our lives and our environments, I wonder whether these ways of thinking might offer better ways to occupy that space? Like, we’re aware of how the pandemic has interrupted the smooth progression of capitalism, and how the planet might benefit from that, but I’m not sure that many of us have thought about it from the perspective of our own bodies. Like, how I only now start to recognize, after 43 years on the planet, how my own urges and need to understand myself as someone who achieves and progresses are basically a result of capitalism’s encroachment into the core of my being. I love the idea of holding space that resists the idea that we should always be progressing and achieving and producing in quantifiable terms. It reflects where I am right now.
SW: For me, I’ve been able to channel some of this stuff directly into the Bloc programme, where we’ve been doing these events called ‘Harsh Light’. How I describe it seems to change a little every time, so I guess you could say it’s emergent. Initially we were unsure about what to put out programme-wise in such uncertain and sick times. Dave and I were immersed in conversations about how we’d live through this as Bloc, having failed to get emergency funding. These questions of survival were in different ways repeated over and over again, not only between us, but between friends, family, and peers. There was a great deal of resonance in the unease of now, the future, and our roles in shaping it. So we wanted to have a more public platform in which we can examine everything that doesn’t feel right — about our work, its structures, and how we are currently bending our lives to fit around them. Harsh Light has become this place for us to do this. It’s a self-reflexive space for the arts to ask: how are we feeling?
IN: In all these conversations, I’m struck by the ways in which we are all learning how to inhabit uncertainty. Learning how to be vulnerable together might be useful in that context. I’m aware as I’m saying this that it’s very much my urge to ‘progress’ that is leading me towards thinking about practical applications of co-vulnerability, but is there some kind of behaviour that comes out of this thinking that you can imagine?
SW: I feel more and more that above all else, the importance is in how it translates. One of the things about the Phd, that was amazing and devastating in equal measures, was to do with feeling more and more locked into concepts. In the last couple of years since I finished my question has been ‘yeah, but then what?’, meaning how do I bring these concepts back into the realm of embodied lived experience. That’s why I feel the parenting thing is so relevant. As I watch a human being make sense of the world around him, and as I am a part of that sense-making, so it feels really important that this has a life to it, rather than just being an interesting thing to mull over. Going back to starlings, I recently heard Adrienne Maree Brown refer to murmurations in a podcast. The way she talked about it though is being ‘in right relation’ to the few people that are most proximal to you. That’s a wonderful supplement and a more felicitous reading, but the takeaway remains the same: be better attuned to those closest to you, try to have the right relations in place. Who knew a flock of birds could teach us so much!
