Based between Berlin and Singapore, the media and performance artist Ming Wong is known for making videos that employ classics of World Cinema as a template for exploring issues of language, behavior and identity. Often inserting himself into the title roles of films ranging from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972) to Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice (1971) and those by the post-war era Malaysian director P. Ramlee, Wong also uses the contemporary body as a vehicle for understanding cinema as a document of changing times. In Four Malay Stories (2005), for example, Wong’s reenactment of scenes from movies made by P. Ramlee between 1956 and 1970 underscores historical shifts in the morals of Malay society. The source films depict scenarios that would be largely unthinkable today given prevailing conservative values: stories of passion, adultery and betrayal.
Originally made for the Malay Cultural Festival at Singapore’s Esplanade in 2005, Four Malay Stories was later included alongside new works and archival material in Wong’s solo exhibition for the Singapore Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009, ‘Life of Imitation’. The exhibition won a Special Jury Mention at the Biennale and has since toured to venues in Singapore, Seattle, Hobart and Tokyo, where it was on view from 25 June 2011 to 28 August 2011 at the private Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, housed in a 1930s-era Bauhaus-style mansion.
Andrew Maerkle met with Wong in Tokyo to discuss his past and current projects, as well as the differences between the structures of production, circulation and visibility in cinema and in contemporary art.
Andrew Maerkle: Many of your works address the circulation of world cinema... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
Ming Wong, Biji Diva!, 2011. Still. Courtesy the artist.
Ming Wong, Four Malay Stories, 2005. Still, 4 channel video audio installation, 25:00 minute loop. Courtesy the artist.
