A Conversation with Magdalen Wong

DAYDREAMING Addiction
  1. skin . uniform . hair . sparkly eyes … active lines of expression … from innocent, cute, and delicate to courageous, strong, and ambitious … a fantasy of sexy feminine strength … a magical power to transform into a greater being …

2. frog and man … adaptation through mimicry of nature … inventions of uniforms and gears     to increase man’s mobility under challenging conditions. In this case, the man’s diving gears increase his agility under water from adopting the frog’s webbed feet.
spontaneous Daydreaming :
I daydreamed of being a woman dressed as a samurai, fighting a long war against a powerful emperor processed by the demon god of Uncertainty. Traveling around the empire, I cut down erratic monsters living amongst human …
I daydreamed of being a teenager who accidentally fell into a manhole, and woke up to find myself in a completely different world where alien plants spoke in strange tongue, and schemed to take over hundreds of microscopic civilizations that were living on large floating lands in the shapes of tetrahedrons, octahedrons, cubes, icosahedrons, and dodecahedrons …
I daydreamed of being born and raised in hell with parents who met and feel in love in their after life, living in the deepest dungeons ruled by the sons of Hades, who raised through the red skies on their dark Pegasus, beating down on unworthy citizens of hell … 
I daydreamed of being a robot created to master and win all the different board games invented by generations of game masters. My success was later challenged by an ordinary human. I struggled with my inability to understand how and why I lost to this human …
I daydreamed of being a traveling cook with the ability to prepare food that evoke certain emotions in people that they themselves are unable to feel …
Why do we dream of powers beyond our human physical capabilities? 
Why do we measure our strength with nature, the universe, and imaginative forces? 
Why do we have the need to borrow and imitate properties found in nature to improve our human facilities?
Anastasia Wong
Video Art piece :
Powers, 2014

Magdalen Wong lives and works in New York