Mo Kong at Queens Museum

Artist: Mo Kong

Exhibition title: Personal Ark by New Yorkool®

Venue: Queens Museum, New York, US

Date: September 23, 2021 – February 13, 2022

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Queens Museum, New York

In theirs exhibition at the Queens Museum, Mo Kong takes us into the not-so-distant future, introducing New Yorkool®, a fictional Asian immigrant-owned consulting firm that offers survival solutions to Americans post-ecological collapse. Emerging among the eerily familiar circumstances of environmental disaster and unprecedented economic and trade isolation, New Yorkool® capitalizes on vulnerable populations suffering from a lack of basic resources. Here in New York, residents are experiencing the hottest winter in history, and have limited access to locally produced fresh foods. New Yorkool® fulfills demand with its new-found methods, and in the process exploits the most basic insecurities of our systems, and the ravaging inequities that emerge from their failures.

Personal Ark inhabits parts of the Flushing Meadows Corona Park- facing entryway and one of the museum’s main galleries, where a central sculpture, growing over the course of the exhibition timeframe, showcases these innovations. Its contents and the surrounding installation incorporate narrative, branding, and sculpture, with purchased, found, and cultivated organic matter. Scent is particularly highlighted, drawing from research on the history of xenophobia and culturally-linked odors. Together this multisensory experience, reveals the dystopian intersection of capital, climate change and biopiracy, global migration, and self-identification that marks our present as much as our imminent future.

Mo Kong, Personal Ark by New Yorkool®, 2022, exhibition view, Queens Museum, New York