Curated by Venus Lau
A native Singaporean currently based in Berlin, Ming Wong playfully reimagines cinema classics through a transcultural lens, populating the films of such directors as Wong Kar-wai, Ingmar Bergman, and Roman Polanski with “impostors”—usually the artist himself, or hired actors—and inverting the films’ titles. Part homage, part satire, Wong’s re-creations transform race, gender, and nationality into fluid categories of identification. In Life of Imitation, 2009, for example—the artist’s contribution to the Fifty-Third Venice Biennale—three male actors of Chinese, Malay, and Indian descent, respectively, reenact an infamous scene from a Douglas Sirk melodrama in which a mixed-race daughter proclaims to her black mother, “I’m white. White!” For his first Beijing solo exhibition, the artist will fuse Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad (1961), Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1971), and Cantonese opera in two video and installation works commissioned by UCCA.
