Christian Patterson: GONG CO.

Christian Patterson: GONG CO. by Aline SmithsonMay 14, 2025

©Christian Patterson, Gong Co. Book Cover

©Christian Patterson, Gong Co. Back Cover

©Christian Patterson, spread from Gong Co.

Perhaps one of the most influential books in the development of my own entry into the world of bookmaking was Christian Pattterson’s thought provoking and multi-faceted work, Redheaded Peckerwood. The myriad visual clues and limited text made me realize that a compelling story can be told up to the point where the viewer of the book bears a substantial burden and/or freedom to interpret what the artist presents. It also provides the artist with multiple visual avenues to pursue. These insights led me to enroll in a workshop conducted by Patterson where I first encountered his complex new tome, Gong Co. as he previewed an early massive draft of the book for the participants. Gong Co. evolved over a twenty-year gestation period and has now emerged as a significant contribution to Patterson’s oeuvre and to the world of photography.

Christian Patterson’s visually layered work has been described as novelistic, subjective documentary of the historical past, and often deals with themes of the archive, authorship, memory, place and time. Photographs are the heart of his multidisciplinary work, which includes drawings, paintings, objects, video and sound. Patterson is the author of four books: Sound Affects (2008), Redheaded Peckerwood (2011, Rencontres d’Arles Author Book Award), Bottom of the Lake (2015, shortlist, Aperture-Paris Photo Book of the Year), and Gong Co. (2024). He is a Guggenheim Fellow (2013), winner of the Grand Prix Images Vevey (2015) a New York Public Library Picture Collection Artist Fellow (2022), and James Castle House Resident (2023). His work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), J. Paul Getty Museum, Milwaukee Art Museum, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, and Ogden Museum of Southern Art.

An interview with the artist follows.

©Christian Patterson, spread from Gong Co.

©Christian Patterson, spread from Gong Co.

©Christian Patterson, spread from Gong Co.

©Christian Patterson, spread from Gong Co.

©Christian Patterson, spread from Gong Co.

©Christian Patterson, spread from Gong Co.

©Christian Patterson, spread from Gong Co.

©Christian Patterson, spread from Gong Co.

©Christian Patterson, spread from Gong Co.

©Christian Patterson, spread from Gong Co.

©Christian Patterson, spread from Gong Co.

©Christian Patterson, spread from Gong Co.

©Christian Patterson, spread from Gong Co.

In what ways do “Gong Co.” and “Redheaded Peckerwood” intersect in their exploration of American narratives? How has your artistic approach evolved through these two projects?

Each project has its own place and time, subject and themes. They intersect through me and my approach to making work. It’s an approach I’d describe as long-form, novelistic, and obsessive; informed by memory, research, and imagination; multidisciplinary and playful…my own, subjective pseudo-documentary of the historical past.

Photographs have been at the heart of my larger projects, but I’ve approached each one with an openness and responsiveness to the subject and themes, place and time, and that has led me to working in other mediums and making many other things.

I don’t think my approach has changed, but each project is very much its own thing, and leads me to new things. With Gong Co” that includes different ways of making photographs, and my first assemblages and monoprints.

©Christian Patterson, from Gong Co.

What inspired you to document the Gong Co. grocery store over two decades? What were the key moments that propelled you forward or put a brake on the book’s progress?

I lived in Memphis, Tennessee between 2002 and 2005. One hot summer day in 2003, I was driving south on Highway 61 in the Mississippi Delta and I got thirsty. I saw a town approaching, exited the highway, and arrived in the small town of Merigold. There, I saw what appeared to be a grocery store, but like everything else in the town, it looked quite old and not open for business.

I walked up to the store, opened its screen door, and walked inside. The door slammed shut behind me and rang a few small bells hanging over my head, signaling my arrival and crossing of the threshold into what immediately felt like a different world, another place, and another time. It had its own atmosphere; it was dark and hot. And a little smelly; it smelled a little like an old book.

As my eyes adjusted to the relative darkness of the room, I saw that it was a small, one-room store with three aisles of shelves, scattered with products and objects that at first glance seemed, strangely, many decades old.

A voice startled me. “Hey, how you doing?”

I turned and saw a small, older man standing behind the small front counter.

“Oh, hi,” I said. “I’m looking for something cold to drink. Got any soda pop?”

“Yeah. Over there.” He pointed to a cooler humming and sweating in a corner behind him, in the very front of the store.

“OK. Mind if I have a look around?” I asked.

The man said, “I’m not going anywhere.”

I slowly walked further into the store, down the first aisle, deeper and deeper. My eyes scanned the shelves and saw old, dusty products. Boxes of dry, processed foodstuff.

Bottles, cans, and jars of perishable stuff – cherries, chicken gizzards, meat sauces. Some of the cans were bulging, some of the jars were leaking.

I had a small camera, made a few quick snapshots, got a soda pop, hopped back in my car, and continued on my way. But for the rest of that day, I couldn’t stop thinking about the store and wondering about it. What was its story? How long had it been there? How did it become this time capsule? How or why was it still open for business?

For the next few years, whenever I was in the area, I stopped in Merigold, always expecting to find the store closed. In 2005 I moved back to New York City, but still periodically returned to Memphis and Mississippi. For about 10 years, the store remained open but there was no sign of any business. And slowly over that time, I began to make photographs and ask questions.

I discovered a prophetic quote from Andy Warhol – “All department stores will become museums and all museums will become department stores.” He was right of course, and I found his words validating and encouraging as I continued to consider how I might develop work in response to the store.

A turning point came when the storeowner told me he was finally planning to close the store. It was then that I began buying hundreds (and eventually a few thousand) products and objects and transporting them to my studio in New York. This expanded my work into a mix of photographs made in the store and in the studio.

I commissioned a scenic painter/faux finisher to create realistic reproductions of various wall and shelf surfaces from the store, based on my photographs. This enabled me to make still lifes anytime I liked. And it proved to be particularly valuable during the pandemic, when I was stuck at home.

But to finally get to your question about what inspired me to document the store over two decades…Well, when I first discovered the store, it simply seemed to be an interesting old place full of interesting old stuff. Then, through Warhol’s quote, I became interested in the conflation of art and commerce. I also began to think more about the small, family-owned mom-and-pop shop, the Mississippi Delta and its historical, cultural, and social context. And then, more slowly over time, the increasingly obvious elements of age and time and something more personal yet undeniably universal and profound — the existential allegory. Life and death.

Why did I spend 20 years ruminating on all this? Well, as I said earlier, when it comes to creative work, it’s my way. When I find a subject that interests me, I’m in for the long haul. I like the long form and novelistic approach. And I’m obsessive.

The general busyness of life and other work also demanded that I work slowly over time. After moving back to New York City, I began publishing and showing other work – “Sound Affects,” “Redheaded Peckerwood,” and “Bottom of the Lake.” I also got married, started a family, and became a homeowner. Big stuff. Gong Co. was simmering on the back burner the whole time.

There were a few big moments that propelled me forward. In 2013, I was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2015, I was awarded the Grand Prix Images Vevey. Each of these honors afforded me the opportunity to have a studio, hire assistants, very occasionally travel to Mississippi, and spend more time on Gong Co.

The Grand Prix also entailed making a show of the work it was supporting, at the 2016 Festival Images, a photography and video biennial in Vevey, Switzerland. While I knew my work on Gong Co. wouldn’t be finished within a year, I was confident I could put together a show and use the experience as a sort of proof-of-concept for how Gong Co. could eventually be more fully realized as an immersive installation.

To do this, I shipped over 1,500 products and objects (still just a portion of my inventory) to Switzerland, along with the front screen door and front counter from the store. I then flew myself, an assistant, and the scenic painter to Vevey, and we worked with the festival’s carpenters and electricians to recreate Gong Co. in a disused retail space on the shore of Lake Geneva.

Getting back to Mississippi…When the storeowner closed the store, he simply shuttered it, leaving most of its contents and products on the shelves. Each of two subsequent owners continued to give me access to the store. I made my last photographs and collected some last products and objects in late 2019, the day before a work crew arrived to completely empty the store and strip it down to its brick shell.

A few months later, the pandemic began. That was another turning point. I’ll never forget Friday, March 13, 2020 and the intense feeling of dread and uncertainty as I walked into my local grocery store and saw nearly empty shelves. It was all very dystopian and strange, yet oddly familiar; it obviously reminded me of Gong Co. For the next few years, I continued working in my studio, on the top floor of my house, where many of the products and objects from the store were being stored, and where they still are today.

It was only through age and time that the deeper meaning and significance of Gong Co. were slowly revealed. As I watched the store decline, die (close), and continue to decay, I was also aging. For a time, I also struggled with chronic pain and depression. The phrase “going out of business,” took on deep, personal meaning. There was something more profound to it all. The existential allegory. The store as a body, a life. The business as an art. The art of survival.

©Christian Patterson, from Gong Co.

©Christian Patterson, from Gong Co.

To what extent is Gong Co. influenced by your association with William Eggleston and his work?

My interest in William Eggleston’s work led me to Memphis, Tennessee, in either 2000 or 2001. I met him and his son Winston, we hit it off, and I convinced them to take me on as an employee. In 2002, I moved from New York City to Memphis to work as their archivist and assistant, at what was then called the Eggleston Artistic Trust (now the Eggleston Foundation).

It was a very early, formative time for me, and Eggleston was far and away my favorite artist at the time. It was an amazing, unique opportunity and I’m forever grateful to the Egglestons for giving me the opportunity to work closely with them, live in Memphis, and begin to develop as an artist.

You know, it was Walker Evans who convinced William Christenberry to take his photographs seriously. And it was Christenberry who convinced Eggleston to experiment with color film. These great artists influenced each other in these ways and more.

There are some very intentional references to my friend Eggleston in a few of the photographs that appear in Gong Co. There are also references to William Christenberry, Walker Evans, Claes Oldenburg, and Paul Outerbridge among others.

©Christian Patterson, from Gong Co.

What does the Gong Co. store represent in the broader context of American culture and the culture of the South? What does it say about the immigrant experience in America, if at all?

As is my practice, I did a lot of research into my subject matter, its content, and historical context. I spent many hours in conversation with the storeowner and current and former residents of Merigold who were also the store’s customers. I met members of the Mississippi Chinese community and read several books on the American South and the Mississippi Chinese. I visited the Delta State University archives, dug into local newspaper archives, and viewed historical photos through the Library of Congress.

I created a timeline weaving together the history of the store, the town, county, state, and country, noting significant eras and moments. The timeline spans all known human habitation of the area. It starts with the Mississippian Culture, early Native American societies stretching back to 800-1600 CE, and includes many historically important events – from the arrival of Hernando de Soto, and slaves from West Africa, to wars, forced displacements, treaties, to the Chinese Exclusion Act, the cotton gin, various Constitutional amendments, the Civil Rights Movement and several of its most significant events. The timeline ends a few years after the closing of the store. My own experience discovering the store and returning to it over 20 years is also woven into the timeline. Its purpose, for me, is to understand the arc of time, the historical context of the place, and how Gong Co. and my work fit into it or relate to it.

The first iteration of Gong Co. may have opened in roughly 1917-1918, or not long after, in a wooden building on the eastern side of the railroad tracks running through Merigold, Mississippi. I have a photograph of that building. It eventually burned down and the business was relocated to a much larger brick building on the western side of the tracks. That building’s original occupant was a cotton office, where cotton from Sunflower Plantation and other local farms was traded and loaded on train cars headed north to Memphis and south to New Orleans.

In 1924, a nine-year-old Chinese American girl, Martha Lum, was forbidden from attending a state high school in Rosedale, 30 miles west of Merigold. Her father, Gong Lum, took her case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which upheld that her exclusion did not violate the 14th Amendment and effectively sanctioned the exclusion of minorities from state schools. The case preceded the more famous Brown v. Board of Education, which eventually ruled that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, by 30 years. Gong Lum was an undocumented immigrant and Chinese American grocer.

In 1955, Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black boy, was kidnapped and lynched after allegedly “wolf whistling” at a white woman inside Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market in Money, 30 miles east of Merigold. The lynching and subsequent trial focused national attention on the open, violent racism of the American South, particularly in Mississippi. Whites in the Delta were angered by the negative attention, and license plates reading “Mississippi: the Most Lied About State in the Nation” appeared in the area. I found one of those license plates while working on Gong Co. and it’s pictured in the book. Imagine being a non-white grocery storeowner, in that time and place, under those conditions.

The South, for me, has a sort of pervasive, low-level background noise; a buzzing or a humming; like a machine whirring in the next room, or cicadas in the trees at night. I can’t be in Mississippi without an awareness of the deeply troubled history of that place, and of our country. In a dark and tragic way, Mississippi, more than any other place, is the crucible of America and its great struggle. I know this is all very dark, but there’s no way around it.

I do think that Gong Co., its ownership, its location in the South and all the context those things entail, and to some extent the products and objects that were on its shelves, do in various ways have a relationship with the immigrant experience, the American South, and America. Through its owner and its customers, through the many products and objects on its shelves and their various origins, images, and uses, there was a pretty complex cultural collision and convergence happening in Gong Co. I don’t want to say too much more about all that, only because I’ve tried to create work that inspires careful looking, self-reflection, and questions based on viewers’ own experiences.

As a white artist from New York City, I don’t have the lived experience. I lived in a medium-sized city in the South for a few years. I saw things, and learned a few things. I moved back to New York City and married an amazing Asian American woman. We’re raising our children in the most ethnically diverse neighborhood in America. We have an unapologetically racist President. Roughly half of the country voted for him. Both immigrants and citizens are facing violence, based on their beliefs, their speech, and the color of their skin.

I’ve made my work with all these things in mind, in my own way, and tried to be careful. Whether or not I succeeded in doing that is up to the individual. I do want to clearly reiterate that there is a difference between content and context. In my view, and in the simplest terms, Gong Co. is primarily about this one particular store, considered as its own reflection of 20th-century America, and its decline, death, and decay as an existential allegory — something to which I think we can all relate.

©Christian Patterson, from Gong Co.

©Christian Patterson, from Gong Co.

©Christian Patterson, from Gong Co.

There are no portraits or human figures anywhere in the book other than the deus ex machina dirty hands holding objects that appear in the studio shots. Why did you opt to omit the shopkeeper/owner of Gong Co. or any human representation other than the hands?

I had photographs of the storeowner in my edit for a very long time. Each was a partially or fully obscured view of the person. Viewed from behind, looking out through the screen door, to the world outside. Peered through spaces between products on the shelves, partially obscured. More fully pictured, standing behind the front counter, but from a distance, looking down the length of the center aisle. And finally, viewed once more from behind, looking over his shoulder as he walked into the darkness of the back of the store.

I was interested in the idea of the conflation of the storeowner and myself. The business and the art. The store and the studio. The products and the pieces. My thinking was, by not ever fully seeing him, that conflation could more easily occur or some mystery could be preserved. The storeowner was also a private, shy person, and I wanted to respect that.

I couldn’t be sure that people would perceive or interpret the obscured identity in the way I intended. And as I began adding other elements to the work, including the cryptic, somewhat haphazard marginalia and naively-rendered, slapdash monoprints, I began to worry that the conflation could feel more like a casting or projection onto him. It was potentially problematic, despite my creative good intentions.

I held onto those images for a long time. When I finally removed them, I was surprised how effectively it pulled me, or my presence, forward in the work, while still maintaining a good amount of confusion or unknowing. What is that? Who made it, or wrote it? Where did it come from? Is it real? Was it found, or created?

Gong Co. isn’t a documentary project; it’s my version of the store; a world that only exists in my mind and in the work. The store, as presented and perceived, is an amalgam. It doesn’t exist. I could explain the many ways how, but I won’t. The inability to fully know something is a good thing.

A seemingly fitting definition of deus ex machina is, “a person or thing (as in fiction or drama) that appears or is introduced suddenly and unexpectedly and provides a contrived solution to an apparently insoluble difficulty.” The disembodied, dirtied hands that appear in Gong Co. seem to fit that definition.

It was only when I began attempting to photograph the store products that I began to understand how difficult it would be. They’re “loud” objects; they’re heavily designed, and often covered with other images and text. They’re meant to grab attention and speak for themselves. And so, I experimented and developed different approaches to picturing them. The hands are one of those approaches.

The hand pictures are also a bit of a device. They serve a purpose while also creating questions that aren’t answered. Their small size on the page facilitates showing more of the products. The hands add a figurative presence. They’re gestural, playful, and mysterious. But to whom do the hands belong — to me or the storeowner? Where were the photographs made — in the store or in the studio? Why are the hands dirty? These aren’t important things to know, or rather they’re things that are important to not know. Am I making sense?

The deus ex machina definition applies, and it doesn’t apply. The hands may feel a bit contrived, but there are other elements where the work of the hand is shown, in the faded, cryptic marginalia and monotype “signs,” and even on the dust jacket wrapped around the book, which includes a handprint.

Can you elaborate on the book’s physical design, such as the aged green cloth cover and brown paper jacket resembling a grocery bag in addition to the intentional foxing of the pages and innumerable other intricate details. I assume your intention was to create an artistic physical object.

The brown paper jacket felt like the perfect wrapper for a book that’s ostensibly about a grocery store. It immediately recalls a brown paper grocery sack. I also have clear, fond memories of using those bags to create covers for my school books, through my childhood and adolescence.

Kraft paper is also such a humble but wonderful material. Cardboard is like that. Newsprint too. Put black ink on any of those, and it’s beautiful. I like those kinds of materials; I often say that I like things that are “low to the ground.” They’re humble, their surfaces are more tactile, and that conveys a realness to me.

The dust jacket is its own form and experience. It has its exterior surfaces. Its “French fold” or “half-half fold” creates two sets of interior flaps, traveling in two different directions. Its interior surface might be glimpsed through its slit. It can be opened and unfolded, and become a surface much larger than the book. These various elements can be viewed at different points in time, before or after the book is “read.” It follows, then, that I designed those surfaces accordingly, with their experience in time in mind.

The exterior is most often the first part of the book that someone sees. The jacket front features a halftone-dot image of the facade of Gong Co. In a way the image is as much not-there as it is there at all. The Kraft paper takes on what I think a designer would call a “knockout” effect, becoming the background to the image of the store. In a way, the form/material and content/image fuse.

The back of the jacket features a simple sales tax table I found in the store, a small price sticker that says “GROCERY,” and a dirty handprint. The spine also says “GONG CO.,” but the content of the book isn’t entirely clear. The various visual elements function more as clues. The jacket also has a few small trompe l’oeil touches — what appear to be pieces of brown tape holding the jacket together.

The first set of inner flaps, folded over the book’s boards, list an alphabetical inventory of the content of the store. The rear inner flap has green overset text: “GONG CO. Merigold, Miss.,” as it might have appeared on a grocery sack, and “Thank you,” which, given its placement, might be one of the last things someone viewing the book might read. The flaps provide the next set of information. It’s a grocery store, with that name, in that place.

The second set of inner flaps include additional green ink elements as they might have appeared on a grocery sack. It’s a “#9” bag (I was born on the 9th day of the 9th month), and its “E-Z OPEN” logo features an oak tree very similar to the large oak tree pictured in the book, which stood in the center of Merigold. Some additional clues also appear — the handwritten message “Going out of Bussiness” (sic), a “1978” date stamp, and the word “PERISHABLE.”

I wanted the book to look and feel like an object that could have come from Gong Co. It had to be green, similar to the color of one of the walls in the store, symbolic of health and wealth among other things. I wanted it to be simple and utilitarian in feel, like a book in a high-use environment such as a library, workplace or shop. I imagined the way it would have been handled and touched over time and how it might bear the traces of that.

I imagined the book in the store, lying flat on a surface, perhaps on a damp shelf, and beginning to decay and mold, from the bottom up. That’s why the rear cover of the book and its latter pages appear to be molding. There’s also additional, more subtle aging. Every page in the book has a subtle patina on its outer edges, and there’s a foxing (a sort of surface mold, age and deterioration) that gradually increases in intensity as the pages of the book are turned. These touches, combined with what’s seen in the store and what’s alluded to in the marginalia and monotypes, I think convey the existential theme of the book.

Why have you consistently presented your work primarily in book form over other options available to you? What new project(s) might you have in mind?

The book form is a wonder. The codex, a form that’s thousands of years old, remains endlessly adaptable, able to amaze and surprise. There’s an art to books — the edit, sequence, layout, and design; the physical form and visual structure. And there’s an opportunity for a unique experience or even a sort of world making in a book.

I do present my work primarily in book form, in that it’s usually realized first as a book and then later as an exhibition or installation. Through the book making process, I learn the work in a very thorough way, frontwards and backwards, inside-out and upside-down. It always teaches me new things about my own work.

The differences between books and exhibitions are many. The audience, the economics, the material and interactive qualities, the sense of time, and time’s duration. And while it’s fair to say that a book and installation are each their own distinct forms, I do find that the making of the book informs if not greatly influences my approach to an exhibition, in what I feel are very positive ways.

I don’t consider myself more of a book artist than an artist in general. I take the same adventurous, multidisciplinary approach to my installations, which over the years have included hand-painted signs, a jukebox, neon, readymade objects, sculptures, shotgun-blasted paper, telephones, televisions, and vitrines full of various objects and ephemera.

I’m soon installing Gong Co. at Robert Morat Galerie in Berlin. It’s a commercial gallery space, and will include photographic prints in frames, painted monoprints in handmade cardboard box frames, and a selection of products and objects hung on walls or placed on various surfaces all around the gallery.

I have ideas for new projects in mind. A few relate to previous projects, most are research- and studio-based, and many are completely non-photographic. I imagine I’ll never get to most of them. For many years now, I’ve been working alone, doing everything myself. Time is limited and so is my speed. I move slowly. See you in another 20 years?