From Small Wonder to Hope | Inside-Out: A conversation with Gordon Fung

ELSEHERE
7 days ago
10 min read

Gordon Fung works across performance, media installation, experimental video, sound, participatory theater, writing, and curatorial practice. His work moves between playful and esoteric registers, but the underlying concern is consistent: how art might help people ask better questions, become more attentive to interdependence, and remain human amid historical repetition, technological acceleration, and social fragmentation. In this edited text-based conversation, Fung reflects on collectivism, stewardship, media, Land-based knowledge, contemplative duration, and why he continues to pursue work that resists both professional narrowing and conceptual simplification.

ELSEHERE: Before you had a name for what you were doing, was there an earlier way you understood yourself in relation to the world?

Gordon Fung: I think what organized me early was not a title or discipline, but a sensitivity to relation. Even before I could describe it clearly, I was drawn toward forms of attention that made me feel connected to something larger than myself, whether through image, sound, performance, or the social field around them. What came later was not the invention of a practice, but a growing ability to recognize the kinds of questions I had already been living inside.

ELSEHERE: Looking back, was there an early environment, encounter, or way of paying attention that quietly shaped how you now work across image, sound, participation, and time?

Gordon Fung: Yes. I grew up with a strong sense that art was not separate from life, and that media was not only a tool but also a condition. Over time, I became increasingly attentive to how form shapes perception, how atmosphere conditions thought, and how a work can reorganize not just what we see or hear, but how we are with one another. That way of paying attention still continues in everything I do.

ELSEHERE: Is there something from that earlier period that still operates in your practice now, not as subject matter, but as rhythm, reflex, or way of organizing experience for others?

Gordon Fung: I think what remains is the desire to create situations in which people can encounter themselves differently. That impulse shows up formally in many ways: through repetition, duration, collective structure, absurdity, or stillness. But at the core, I am still trying to organize conditions in which another mode of relation becomes possible.

ELSEHERE: Across artist, curator, performer, organizer, and community-builder, what is the question, pressure, or condition that most consistently organizes your practice?

Gordon Fung: To offer hope, and to guide viewers toward meaningful questions about the interdependence of all beings. I was born near the end of the Cold War, but the fear of nuclear disaster and the AIDS epidemic still lingered in the atmosphere. Then came the pandemic, ongoing warfare, and the repeated spectacle of human-made chaos. It makes me wonder whether the world has really improved, despite technological advancement.

So much of my practice asks how we remain composed together, and how we support one another in the face of violence that is, in many cases, entirely avoidable. If political and cultural leaders understood selflessness and interdependence more deeply, many of these crises would not repeat in the same way. In that sense, I feel close to Fluxus, Dada, and Gutai, not only aesthetically, but in their anti-war force, their use of play, absurdity, and the collapsing of art and life as a way of imagining how humanity might move somewhere better together.

ELSEHERE: You work across participatory theater, media archaeology, time-based media, performance, installation, and writing. When you think about your practice now, what feels most like method rather than medium?

Gordon Fung: Medium is only the vehicle. Method is the deeper question. I do not really have a fixed loyalty to medium; I trust media enough to let them inform me what needs to be picked up. If a work calls for character-building, moral pedagogy, or community engagement, I may turn to curation or theater. If I want to create a cathartic sound bath, I make noise. If I want someone to sit with a work, I may make video. If I want to poke fun at a theme, I might move into performance or conceptual art.

What matters to me is not the medium in itself, but the alignment between method and vehicle. I think of myself, in part, as someone trying to reveal hidden potentials inside mediums by bringing them into right relation with a method. I am also cautious about assigning fixed meanings to works. Definitions are unstable. What matters more is whether the work opens a path toward introspection.

ELSEHERE: In sixty-six seconds from small wonders of life, what made you trust such a restrained form: static shots, fixed duration, small moments, and almost no spectacle?

Gordon Fung: There were two intertwined considerations. One is on the viewer’s side, and the other is on the observer’s side, meaning my own body while filming. I have training in music composition, so my sense of time is strong. Sixty-six seconds felt moderate and exact. It is long enough for the viewer to settle, but not so long that one becomes fully lost or attached. That fixed duration also creates a small pact with the viewer: one constant remains stable, while other variables arise. The uncertainty lies in what the next clip will be, not in how long you must endure it.

For me physically, the duration also comes from the limits and intelligence of my body. Most of the shots are handheld. I need to regulate my breath, movement, and stability. Even with a tripod, cheap equipment often failed in wind or vibration. Sixty-six seconds became the duration I could hold with enough steadiness while still allowing the image to breathe. The slight movement created by my breathing or by the wind does not bother me. I am not seeking perfection. I am interested in accepting the moment as it is.

There is also a practical honesty to it. Standing in Midwest winter conditions with bare hands under extreme windchill teaches you very quickly what your body can and cannot hold.

ELSEHERE: You describe the work as an invitation to slow down and do “nothing.” What kind of attention does that “nothing” actually require?

Gordon Fung: If we call it a requirement, though I do not think it is truly one, I would say it asks for undivided attention and a kind of single-pointed concentration. But that concentration is not forceful. It is more about sitting with thought, observing without grasping, and allowing your mind to move without immediately disciplining it.

I am quite sure that viewers’ minds wander during this work. Mine does too. That is fine. I think of the video as a portal for introspection. The point is not to empty the mind into some purified state, but to be with whatever is actually present: distracted thought, stillness, irritation, admiration, whatever arises. There is also, very simply, the chance to contemplate quietly and to let the beauty of nature remain unelaborated.

ELSEHERE: You write about collectivism, synergy, stewardship, and interconnectedness. In actual practice, what do those ideas ask you to do concretely, beyond language?

Gordon Fung: In stewardship, I often think through Joseph Beuys and social sculpture. I see experimental theater as a decentralized platform of stewardship in which artists and participants take active roles in shaping the dynamics in real time. Even if the encounter is temporary, it can still produce a meaningful sense of collective responsibility and accountability.

Within participatory theater, I try to guide artists toward co-creating a democratized space in which no single action or voice is made inherently more significant than another. Every module affects the others. Every presence alters the field. That, to me, is a practical exercise in interconnectedness.

This also shaped why I began curating. I did not begin with an ambition to become a curator. In fact, I had a strong aversion to curatorial ego. But over time I came to think of curation, at its best, as a form of caretaking, giving back, and building conditions for others to grow. It is exhausting work, but deeply meaningful. One of the most rewarding things in building my collective has been seeing artists evolve through shared projects and dialogues, sometimes even taking up entirely new practices because the space allowed them to do so. That is the kind of collectivity I care about: not abstraction, but a structure in which people genuinely transform one another.

ELSEHERE: There is a strong tension in your materials between collective experience and private contemplation. On one side, you build participatory and communal structures. On the other, this video work asks the viewer to slow down, remain still, and be alone with duration. How do those two impulses meet in your practice?

Gordon Fung: People have asked me this many times, because there is often a visible polarity in what I do. Some of my work is loud, chaotic, cathartic, confrontational. Other pieces are deliberately quiet, slow, and minimally stimulating. Some people wonder whether they are made by the same person.

I do not try to blend those opposites together literally, because I do not think that is how non-duality works. To me, non-duality is not the flattening of difference. It is the harmonious inseparability of opposing forces. Light and shadow, creation and destruction, artist and curator, community and solitude. They remain distinct, yet they cannot be fully separated.

Collective experience and private contemplation inform each other in the same way. A forest is not a forest without trees, and a tree is not a tree without its leaves. You can keep breaking form down into smaller and smaller interdependencies. So for me, community and solitude are not contradictions. They are both necessary. Spending time in collective experience and spending time alone are part of the same larger rhythm. I happen to need both very strongly.

ELSEHERE: You say this project is devoted, in part, to rekindling your relationship with this Land. What does that phrase mean for you here: memory, geography, belonging, ethics, repair, or something else?

Gordon Fung: In a broad sense, the work shares visual memory and a very subtle state of mind as observer. I hope it invites viewers to appreciate nature and its contemplative force whenever such moments arise. I have had experiences in wilderness spaces where quietness becomes so total that it almost turns into sound, where consciousness feels inseparable from the surroundings. In those moments, the Land and the self are no longer experienced as discrete.

But the phrase also means more than atmosphere. It refers to a deeper relation of reciprocity, ancestry, and spiritual practice. I work with Land-based knowledge and believe that the Land responds when approached with respect and sincerity. My own bloodline and upbringing did not explicitly transmit these ways of knowing, so part of my work has involved trying to recover and unearth those relations through introspection, divination, meditation, and lived attention.

The Land also teaches through beauty and violence at once. Geological formation is beautiful, but it is born through collision, destruction, and immense force. I see there a parallel with birth itself, with endurance, with mothers, with pain transformed into love and continuation. When I speak of rekindling my relationship with the Land, I mean all of this at once: awe, reciprocity, memory, spiritual labor, and the ethical responsibility to listen back.

ELSEHERE: At this stage of your life and work, what feels ready to be re-seen now?

Gordon Fung: I want to return more fully to video and media work. In recent years, my curatorial, administrative, and organizing labor has taken up enormous amounts of time. I can build large projects quickly, but that efficiency has a cost. It requires huge responsibility and often leaves very little room for rest, for non-art life, or for the slower side of my own artistic process.

There is now a real urgency for me to revisit the artistic side of my practice more directly, especially through media. I am interested in how media can reveal hidden aspects of consciousness without being glorified. Technology is a double-edged sword. Used with awareness, it can accelerate insight. Used mindlessly, it can deepen confusion and attachment.

So I want to return to work that engages technology critically, conceptually, and sometimes absurdly. I want to make works that plant seeds rather than flatten complexity, works that do not explain too much, but still intervene in how viewers understand technology, spirituality, consciousness, and human conduct in a degenerating age.

ELSEHERE: What has life taught you that your field, training, or theory alone could not?

Gordon Fung: Altruism, kindness, reciprocity, generosity, compassion, unconditional love. Human beings cannot survive without these, yet contemporary curricula often barely address ethics and morality. They do not obviously increase commercial value, so they tend to be sidelined.

Life also taught me that wonder and curiosity are necessary to any real human development. And in curatorial and community work, active listening and empathy are not optional virtues. They are the foundation of an environment built on mutual respect. Working with diverse artists and participants has taught me how much one must serve and adapt in order to build something genuinely shared.

I often return to my Jesuit educational background, especially the phrase “to serve and not to be served.” That principle stayed with me. It continues to shape how I think about art, leadership, and community.

ELSEHERE: When people encounter your work, what do you hope stays with them after the image, event, or performance is gone?

Gordon Fung: I hope the work leaves behind meaningful questions. I hope it helps people become more mindful of who they are, of the conditions in which they are living, and of the situations of the world around them. In participatory contexts especially, I want the encounter to leave an imprint of altruism, reciprocity, and hope.

At the same time, I also want to offer a quiet warning: no matter how beautiful an image, event, or phenomenon is, one must not grasp onto it. Let it go gracefully. If it is gone, do not cling. Recognize it as it is, and let it pass. The earlier one understands this, the better.

ELSEHERE: When you are no longer present, what would you want the work to continue doing without you?

Gordon Fung: A successful work is one that continues to live without the artist or curator. My presence is often implied through absence. In some works, I deliberately decentralize the role of the maker so that the audience’s experience and participation become the work itself. The equipment is only a medium. The method is the encounter.

I am skeptical of authorial ego. Once a work is completed, it has its own life. The so-called creator is no longer central to it and has no true control over what it becomes. That detachment is not loss for me. It is a good practice. It cuts away ego and lets the work become a reflection of the recipient’s mind.

Ideally, the work continues to function as an invitation to introspection, without me needing to stand beside it and explain it.

ELSEHERE: If this feature had a title, what would you want it to be called?

Gordon Fung: from small wonder to hope.

About Gordon Fung

Gordon Fung is a transdisciplinary artist-curator, writer, performer, multi-instrumentalist, and “runaway composer” whose work spans audiovisual performance, new media installation, experimental film and video, media archaeology, participatory practice, and Happenings. Informed by Tibetan Buddhism, Hermeticism, Land-based knowledge, and Chicago’s video and media arts lineage, his practice seeks to guide audiences toward introspection, interdependence, and the reactivation of agency through play, absurdity, and serious attention. He is also the founder and director of the neo-Fluxus theater troupe //sense, through which he has built decentralized spaces for collaborative experimentation, stewardship, and collective transformation.

About ELSEHERE / STRATUM Artist Features

ELSEHERE / STRATUM artist features are not only about the work in isolation. They are also about the deeper structures that shape a practice over time: methods, memories, ways of seeing, commitments, and the lived conditions that continue to press upon the work from within. Through text-based conversations, we invite artists to think in their own language and at their own pace, so that the work can be encountered not only as an object, but as part of a larger human and intellectual field.