Coronavirus Catch & Cook in NYC

I started working on this in March, when the coronavirus hit New York, and everything was really unclear and a bit scary. Because this virus is very much invisible and formless, I wanted to give form to it in a certain way. A strange object I’d found while fishing at Gravesend Bay (by the Belt Parkway) on April 22, 2018 had always been in my mind, and I’d always wanted to make work about it. I still don't know exactly what it was or why it was there, except that it looked like a packed mass of internal organs. (If you know or have speculations, please share with me.) An idea came to me to claim this mysterious object as the coronavirus, and make a "catch and cook" video. 

I took it as a challenge to make a video that is very much focused on the object, both formally for the camera language and for the overarching structure of the "catch and cook” genre.* This fluid exchangeability among objects - the actual coronavirus, the captured object I claimed to be the virus, and the object I made to resemble the object claimed to be the virus (that I later cooked) - was a fun thing for me to work on. At the same time, the work is a documentation of a life during the pandemic and a legitimate fishing video from New York.

*This work is funded, in part, by a Canada Council for the Arts grant.

Object

Dog Shark, Sea Robin, Clearnose Skate, COVID-19

Body of Water

 Gravesend Bay

About the Artist

Yi Xin Tong is an artist and fisherman. He uses multimedia installation, site-specific projects, video, and sound to analyze seemingly disparate social conditions, and our contradictory relationships with ourselves and with other living beings, objects, and cultural entities. His experience living on the outskirts of New York City led him to a long-term multimedia fishing project that challenges the iconic image of the city as the pinnacle of human civilization, and seeks relief, nature, and weird things. Tong’s work has been exhibited at BRIC Biennial, Guangzhou Airport Biennale, UCCA, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, NARS Foundation, MOCA Shanghai, CAFA Art Museum, and chi K11 art museum.