There is no more famous ghost than Shakespeare’s King Hamlet. The denizens of Denmark are not quite afraid of him— but he does stoke their ire. Each night, they impatiently await his reappearance. With paranoid zeal, they interrogate his reasons for stalking their rotten state: “I charge thee, speak!,” demands Horatio. 1 They enlist the help of the King’s surviving son, Prince Hamlet, who avows to avenge his father’s death in order to exorcise his ghost. Banishment can be the ghost’s only fate. Holly Wong, on the other hand, is not afraid of ghosts. Perhaps she once was. But her most recent work demonstrates a decisive gesture to engage—to entangle—with the spirit world. The “Shadow Body” series (2019–2023) gives physical form, through layers of diaphanous tulle, to her late mother’s spirit. Room-sized installations such as Body of Light (2023) and Guardian of the Spirits (2022) envelop the viewer with thousands of fabric scraps that have been stitched together, creating makeshift enclosures under which the living and the dead can dwell together and mutually heal. Wong and her mother certainly had much that required healing. In interviews, the artist recalls having come home one day to find the walls of her childhood home shot through with bullet holes, the consequence of her father’s drug dealing. Her mother, an unstable presence in her life, died prematurely of alcoholism and domestic violence when Wong was still a teenager. Unlike Marcellus, Horatio, and the rest of Hamlet ’s ilk, Wong does not seek to banish the ghost. Rather, her work evinces a desire to live with the ghost, to embrace that which remains as a virtuality even as it is physically no longer. I borrow this language from the theorist Mark Fisher, who borrows a term from another theorist—the late Jacques Derrida—to illuminate how, and why, certain artworks are haunted by past forms. Hauntology is a neologism: a combination of haunting and ontology, the metaphysics of being. As with Derrida before him, Fisher is particularly interested in the reflexive temporality of the ghost—in its ability to come to us as if from the future, as well
1 William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Hamlet: Prince of Denmark , ed. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012), 11.
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Holly Wong’s Reparative Hauntology
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