MORRISON GONG

GIVE ME PLEASURE OR GIVE ME DEATH

C’mon Everybody, 325 Franklin Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11238

December, 2021

Olympia is pleased to present, Give Me Pleasure or Give Me Death, a solo exhibition of new photographs by Morrison Gong, off-site at C’mon Everybody in Brooklyn, NY.

“Whenever the golden thread of pleasure enters that web of things which our intelligence is always busily spinning, it lends to the visible world that mysterious and subtle charm which we call beauty.” - George Santayana

Morrison Gong manipulates the fictitious nature of photography to create staged realities, while inviting space for improvisation, randomness, and chance. Informed by the philosopher and poet George Santayana’s considerations on the materials of beauty, where he favored a radical reconciliation of spirit and nature, Gong’s visual approach to intimacy originates in the sphere of sexuality; emerging as “pleasure objectified” a state of being intended for both viewer and photographic image.

Gong’s recent series of portraits interweave a theory of aesthetic experience with physical pleasure. Sitters range from old friends, crushes, acquaintances, and strangers, with whom the artist made a collaborative playlist to accompany the photographs. They disrupt and re-work conventional writings of erotic symbolism that depend on physical and spiritual distance and coquetry. Tensions traditionally found  between the pornographic tendency to reveal and the erotic tendency to conceal are blurred.  

Morrison Gong moved to the United States from China when they were 18 years of age. The presence of their Chinese and nonbinary identity enables them to foreground intimacy and question how personal spaces are developed pictorially. Artifacts can represent mementos of anthropocentric experiences, while nature represents a sort of origin of beauty and catalysis for vivacious and bold flux. Somewhere in between these spaces, the nuanced dynamics of relationships are preserved.