Chiptography: We met in New York City several years ago but you moved to London last year. Why did you move to London?
Claire Kwong: I’ve always wanted to move abroad, and they speak English here. About eight years ago when I was in college I had a dream of going to Goldsmiths. They have a good creative computer art program and I wanted to do it when I was in undergrad but I didn't get to because scheduling didn't work out. I don't think I was at that point in my life when I was 20 to just move to a different country.
Chiptography: How did you find the transition?
Claire Kwong: There are a lot of little things that are different that threw me for a loop. On the surface, they're very similar but people walk really slowly. Well not slowly, but we're from New York and I'm like, "Get out of the way!" And also, decide whether you walk on the right or the left. Right?
Claire Kwong at the entrance of her school, Goldsmiths.
Chiptography: That is something that I've also been confused with because the traffic flows on the left side but then sometimes when you're in the Underground, you're walking on the right side.
Claire Kwong: The sign will tell you walk right or left. There are tourists who don't know what they're doing and I don't know what I'm doing.
Chiptography: It's not consistent.
Claire Kwong: Food is worse so I've had to learn to cook some more. I've met a lot of people from all over Europe which I really appreciate, a lot of different diverse backgrounds.
Chiptography: I came to know you through the chip scene because you are a visual artist. How did chiptune find you as far as making your work?
Claire Kwong: When I was 20 I took a semester off of school. I was like, I want to be an artist in New York City. That's all I had. So I moved there for a semester.
Chiptography: Where did you move from?
Claire Kwong: I moved from Providence, Rhode Island from Brown University. When I was in New York I interned for Harvestworks and that's where I met Haeyoung Kim, Bubblyfish.
Chiptography: What type of company is Harvestworks and what did you do for them?
Claire Kwong: Harvestworks is a center for digital media art. It runs a residency program where artists develop new work and can get help from technicians. I was one of those technicians and I helped artists with code. I was assigned to help Haeyoung on this project, Moori. It’s this really cool interactive art performance. I did some coding for her and one day when we were sitting in my basement room she was like, “Let me show you this thing I'm working on for this Devo compilation of chiptune” and she played Love Without Anger and I was like, what is this? It was chiptune. It sounded so raw and aggressive but really good. I really enjoyed it and that was a side of her that I hadn't seen before. It was cool to see a different side of her. It was also really important for me to see an Asian woman doing that stuff.
Chiptography: She must have been someone who you could identify with in a lot of ways.
Claire Kwong: She still is a role model for me. I went back to school for one semester and I came back to NYC the following summer. Then I went to my first Pulsewave. It was Ladies Night.
Chiptography: That was your FIRST Pulsewave?! That was one of my all-time favorite Pulsewaves.
Claire Kwong: It was so good! It made me feel so welcome. I'm a shy person. I'm really anxious and I always feel the patriarchy but it felt so good. It felt really amazing. It was all Asian women on stage.
Chiptography: Right, it was Drum Machine Dating Service, Bubblyfish, Corset Lore with visuals by CHiKA. It was probably very misleading.
Claire Kwong: Yes, actually it was. It was super misleading!
Chiptography: When did you start to actually perform as a visual artist?
Claire Kwong: I think my first one was in 2015 with bryface and Mega Ran. It was meaningful for me to be part of a racially diverse lineup. I met Jessen through ITP camp which is at NYU. Jessen had seen me do stuff with Glitch Cake, my previous band. I knew our friend, Kat Tingum, from Harvestworks. I would try out all sorts of experimental things that would project on her face and things like that, doing stuff with her body. I really enjoyed that and I think Jessen might have seen one of the shows and so he asked me to do visuals for his show, I/O Chip Music.
Chiptography: Since then, have you been involved in the chip scene here in London?
Claire Kwong: I've gone to a few shows but I’ve only performed once. I think it's less frequent than in New York. I find it's a little bit harder to break into as an outsider. I find it's harder to sell yourself as a visualist. What I do is very integrated into the live show. You have to watch the visuals and how it interacts with the artist. That's very important to me.
Chiptography: For me, the visual element of a show is 50% of what makes a good show. A lot of people go there because of who’s playing but if there were no visuals the show's not the same. It really is a 50/50 thing for me. I don't know if a lot of people realize how important the visual element is.
Claire Kwong: Yes, absolutely. You have to find out what works with an artist and complement their music.
Chiptography: I really appreciate that. I photographed you once at WordHack. The performance was quite different from the work you make for chip shows.
Claire Kwong: WordHack is a monthly night of words and technology. It's run by Todd Anderson. The whole thing is trying to mix words, literature, and technology in any way possible so it's very broad. I performed at WordHack three times. It's a really great community. It's almost like the chiptune scene but people are less... they don't move as much.
Chiptography: It's not a show you go to to dance. It's more performance art.
Claire Kwong: I did performance art but other people will show work in their browser or they'll read things. It's kind of like a poetry reading or slam poetry but with words projected on your mouth.
Chiptography: What was your piece about? Describe it for me.
Claire Kwong: The performance was called Voice. I took phrases from my journals and projected them on my mouth one word at a time, like Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries. Todd called it Young-Hae Chang Dental Industries. I love the textural possibilities of projection, especially on a body. I especially love it inside a mouth. It's so intimate and unexpected.
Photography of Claire Kwong’s performance at WordHack in 2017.
Claire Kwong: I find that my art practice has split. I was thinking about that when I was working on my website for public presentation so people can look at me and get me a job. I split my website into artwork and visuals.
Chiptography: I saw some photos of your final project. Can you tell me about that?
Claire Kwong: It's called Light Touches Skin and it's a play area with a floor projection. People can go in and the goal is to make different shapes with your body to fill out some shapes like triangles. The projection will be on your body. I aim for it to feel very textural and visceral, so like bumps on your skin moving and crawling. I wanted to make an unnatural experience that will bring people closer together. Touch is very hard. People in London go out of their way to avoid touching each other, which is reasonable. They did that even in my installation. Obviously, it's very loaded with unwanted touching and all that but I wanted to push the boundaries of my art and create social situations where people must cooperate in order to win. It's a game in that way. They'll find themselves making strange movements and touching each other and everyone always laughs a lot. They take selfies a lot.
Chiptography: That would be really interesting to bring it to different parts of the world and see how your piece changes with different cultures.
Claire Kwong: I think that's interesting. Thinking back on my own touch phobia, given that my family is from Hong Kong which is densely populated and touch averse, they're like, "None of that." They have a big house now and they're not very touchy-feely people. For me, I wasn't a very touchy person but when I moved to New York, people were huggers. After every show they always want to hug you at the end, especially if you collaborated on visuals. I like hugging. I grew to like it. I grew to give really tight hugs.
Chiptography: I have to really trust and like someone to feel comfortable hugging.
Claire Kwong: People will assume you want to 'cause they're hugging everybody else and you're a woman. It's assumptions like that. Maybe I started coping with it by embracing hugging and also trying to question it in my work. I am a little touch phobic.
Chiptography: Tell me more about your family. Do you have any brothers or sisters?
Claire Kwong: Yeah, a younger sister and a younger brother.
Chiptography: You're the oldest of three? Me too! Was there an expectation from being the eldest in your family?
Claire Kwong: I think so. I've always been very independent. I've always tried to figure things out for myself. I moved the furthest away obviously. I always held myself to a higher standard like achieving stuff academically or being together emotionally which is a hard standard to live up to. I never wanted to depend on my parents. I know that Asian parents have high expectations but they also are a bit of a helicopter. Even though they have good intentions, it's a different kind of relationship than we have with kids in Hong Kong.
Chiptography: Tell me about where you grew up.
Claire Kwong: I grew up in Rockville, Maryland. Well, I was born in LA, in Pasadena, but I only lived there for three years. Do you know the Rodney King Riots?
Chiptography: Yeah.
Claire Kwong: My dad didn't feel safe anymore. That was when I was a baby. We moved to where his family was in Maryland. My mom's family was in California but they had moved by that point to San Francisco or Sacramento. My parents immigrated to the US from Hong Kong separately when they were 16. They didn't know each other before.
Chiptography: So they met here, in the States?
Claire Kwong: They met in Los Angeles. It was cute. After the riots happened, my dad left his job. He was an engineer at LADWP, LA Department of Water and Power. There was a labor strike and a picket took out his car light. I don't know all the details but he didn't feel safe. He didn't want us to grow up like that and there was smog everywhere. My dad's three older sisters and his parents were in DC so we moved to Rockville, Maryland. It's a suburb of DC, about 30 minutes outside. A lot of people worked for the government. Everyone there is either a doctor, lawyer or engineer which is the Asian parent's dream, right? My dad was an engineer for a company for 15 years until he made his own company which was very inspiring to me. As an engineer focused on energy efficiency and things like that to make the environment better.
Chiptography: That was his own company?
Claire Kwong: Yes, it's just him as an employee but he made it work. He just didn't want to have a boss which is relatable.
Chiptography: Does he still work in that industry?
Claire Kwong: He does. He's doing good for the world which is all I want in my career. I don't want to just make other people money. My mom works for a public school system as a counselor for students who come from other countries. They're often very troubled. She actually learned Spanish to help all the kids who came from Central America. She helps Chinese and Spanish speaking students. It's very noble work. It's very difficult work.
Chiptography: It must be an emotional career too. You're dealing with children who potentially don't feel safe. They had to move from dangerous environments.
Claire Kwong: There's a lot of trauma there. My mom has kids who literally walked from Honduras. Literally. Just thinking about that, my God... Through that we've all become very sympathetic to immigrants. I mean, my parents are immigrants, right? But a different wave. My grandpa wanted a better life for his daughters. My mom’s family immigrated to the San Francisco Bay Area when she was 16 but soon her parents went back to Hong Kong to work, leaving her there with her sisters. They were floundering around. There are funny stories but also not all funny. It was a bit traumatizing too because she was 16.
Chiptography: Trying to figure things out at such a young age is difficult. I can't imagine if I was going to a foreign country. I mean, even you coming to an English speaking country, you didn't feel comfortable until you were a little older.
Claire Kwong: Yeah. I think my comfort level is a bit higher. Well in different ways higher and lower than my parents. But yeah, Rockville, Maryland. There are a lot of Asian immigrants. The majority of the friends I made in school were Asian. We even had our own clique called "The Asian Angle." It was so dumb.
Chiptography: No! I like it! So why angle?
Claire Kwong: In high school at lunch, we would sit at an angle, a corner. We had a lot in common because we all had the stereotypical Asian parents. They're very demanding. My friends were all very academically driven. I felt a lot of pressure. I wanted to get away from that. I really felt a strong pull to not be the typical Asian person. That might not be totally true for everybody but I didn’t want to be the person who becomes the lawyer, engineer or doctor and doesn't really have interests. That's the stereotype and that's what Asian parents might want you to be.
Chiptography: Even if you do have a drive towards art, it's often expected that you put that to the side and make that hobby.
Claire Kwong: Right. It took my parents a long time to come around to my art.
Chiptography: Have they come around?
Claire Kwong: I think they're trying. They like it but they still don't understand it. They didn't like me going to New York to be an artist when I was 20. I took a semester off. That's not the way to do things really but I was being a rebel and I was being an artist.
Chiptography: Do you feel like it had to do with the fact that you had this very strong internal identity of being an artist but you were being told to go on this different path?
Claire Kwong: Yes. I majored in computer science and also modern culture and media which is like art and technology but I always felt pressured into doing computer science because it was marketable and it could get me a job. That's what my parents wanted me to do. It's been useful. It's good to know how to code but I did not want to be just like that in my life. I wanted to be an artist.
Chiptography: When did you first know you wanted to be an artist and did you have anyone in your family or childhood that exposed you to art and nurtured you?
Claire Kwong: I've always been creative. I wrote stories all throughout my childhood. I also made websites as a teenager – girly sites where you drag and drop clothes onto dolls. My parents were always supportive but a little bemused because they aren't creative themselves. I never really thought of it as art until I went to college and took a class about digital art. That class inspired me to use the tools from my computer science classes towards weird, counterproductive, artistic ends.
Chiptography: It's inspiring for me to know someone like yourself who has that innate talent. With computer science, you can go and take classes. With art, there's a lot of internal intuition and sensibility.
Claire Kwong: There is. I've often felt like there's a lot of self-mythologizing with artists in that we have to put our own personal lives into our art at all times. I tried to do that for a while but it got really exhausting and hard. Now I try to strike a balance. That's why I try to involve other people in interactive installations, like making other people touch each other.
Chiptography: It still relates to a personal experience for you. Your personal experience can also be relatable for so many other people.
Claire Kwong: Absolutely. I often find that art, it's one of the ways that I reach out to people. I'm such a shy person. I never talk to people.
Chiptography: Outside of your art, what are your interests and passions?
Claire Kwong: In a way, being an artist is so much part of my identity so a lot of what I do is related to art. I like to go to art museums. I love going to upstate New York to see Dia:Beacon. I had a tradition for a while where I would go there for my birthday. It's in January and I loved seeing the frozen Hudson River on the train for two hours and then just going inside and taking a selfie of myself in front of the same artwork and seeing how much I changed.
Chiptography: Which artwork would you always photograph yourself with?
Claire Kwong: On Kawara's Today series, a collection of paintings spanning over 40 years that each just show the date the painting was made. At Dia:Beacon there's a gallery of them in chronological order. I always posed next to the painting from 1992, the year I was born. That's what I like, being on the train by myself and listening to chiptune. The last birthday I did that I was listening to the Depreciation Guild. It's very emotional chiptune. I was thinking about my life. If there's no WiFi then it's great because you can just think about things. There are only a few places in this world without WiFi like the shower and the train. Those are the places that are the most introspective to me.
Chiptography: You are the first woman that I'm interviewing for my project. Tell me about your experience as a woman in chiptune. I know that you said your first chiptune experience was an all-female lineup which as we said was pretty deceiving.
Claire Kwong: I remember feeling really welcomed in that room. I remember seeing women I knew like Nicole Carroll. She was my boss at Harvestworks. I saw that she knew Haeyoung and I was seeing this beautiful network of women who knew each other and supported each other. I really liked that. Maybe that was part of why I came back to New York. As a woman in the chiptune scene, I do sometimes feel tokenized as a one-person diversity ad but I do not want that to be the only reason I'm there. I want my work to speak for itself. There were so many times I've been the only woman. I try to bring a bit of a feminine perspective to my visuals. I try to include a lot of pink and blue and more red, soft things like body parts, eyes, mouths. I was doing visuals for Trash80 for Magfest and FreqFest. His work is very emotional to me and it resonated with me even before I knew him. For Missing You, I remember putting on a pair of lips but then it would fade away and glitch and overlay with some shapes. It was all hot pink. I tried to do something that not only resonated with the music but also brought a feminine visual perspective to the stage.
Chiptography: If you had any superpower, what would it be and why?
Claire Kwong: I've always wanted to fly! It's not that practical since we have airplanes, but every time I dream about it I crave the sensation in the morning. That's all I want, the sensation. That's the instinctive side of me. But if I actually could have any superpower, I would probably do a ton of research and make a spreadsheet to find the most practical one. I'd never be able to decide.
Chiptography: Did you have a favorite chiptune memory?
Claire Kwong: It was Glenn Graeber’s farewell party before he joined the navy.
Chiptography: Glenn is a staple behind the scenes guy who helped 8static with technical operations. He’s a goofy guy who genuinely cares about his friends and family.
Claire Kwong: It was such a good party. It was in Allister’s (SKGB) kitchen in Philly. Mike Goodman (DIY_Destruction) had to leave early so Glenn switched us around and I ended up doing visuals for Ap0c. I didn't have anything prepared for him but at the last minute he suggested, why don't you just go on the internet and browse and that will be my visuals. It was hilarious.
Chiptography: What did you browse?
Claire Kwong: I went to Facebook and I browsed my feed.
Chiptography: That's so personal!
Claire Kwong: Yeah! It felt very personal but I also felt comfortable. It was so funny at the time. Allister had a tapestry on the wall and Mike took a picture of it and posted it on Facebook. I scrolled on my feed and saw the tapestry on the projection. It was so amazing. I loved it. Everyone was screaming out words for me to Google. Everyone was so happy.
Chiptography: This is one of those times when you take it to the next level with your artwork. It seems like a simple concept but your visuals are layered, smart and interactive.
Claire Kwong: Another set I did with Ap0c was at 8static when I was first starting. It was also very funny. I think he's a conceptual thinker like me. He was making these memes about the SoundCloud orange ball so he told me he was going to bring these orange ping pong balls and throw them at the audience. You know the ball you get when you get an alert? So I made a fountain of SoundCloud balls on his site. It was hilarious. I love when I can bring conceptual art but also when I can bring humor into visuals. That's my favorite.
