Chinese immigrants brought wayang street opera to Singapore in the mid-nineteenth century. These shows, though staged as free public entertainments, also had a ritualistic component: Typically performed on temple grounds on elaborately decorated makeshift stages to please the deities, they were often presented on the gods’ birthdays and public holidays. The tradition continues today in many places in the Chinese-speaking world.

Ming Wong has re-created the facade of one of these familiar street theaters. Installed behind the Singapore Art Museum on a port surrounded by shipping containers, Wayang Spaceship, 2022, “activates” nightly between 7:15 and 7:45 p.m. However, in keeping with Wong’s longtime interrogation of the cinematic, the main content of this theatrical simulation is a duel between Cantonese opera and sci-fi flicks from the 1950s and ’60s. This cross-cultural clusterfuck is abetted by moving aluminum panels surrounding the rear screen, with the reflected video projections creating the illusion of flashing lights, and a mad furious soundtrack that promises apocalypse and spectacle in equal cups. You start to trip out as soon as you swallow their contents. Perhaps “trip out” is a bad metaphor; we are in Singapore, after all, and don’t want to get caned or worse. The sun starts going down as the non-drug trip begins: We hear the twirling bright vocals of a female alto rowing her way through some bucolic swamp, her painted face on the screen soon spaghettified by a green-ray overlay; soon a Martian will come to take her away. The stage on either side of the screen pulses with light. The sound of a siren ringing out and the atonal chaos of retro cinematic evocations of invasion now undergird the music. A fun-house-mirror curtain slowly closes its panels over the screen, forming a new reflective distortive surface, upon which will be projected yet further layers of this apocalyptic incursion of some terrible extraterrestrial species: colonialism in the form of exacerbation. We are, after all, dangling off the very end of a continent. Why not the end of if not the world then a world? The films farmed for content here in Wong’s manic collage include Lady in the Moon (1954), The Nymph of the River Lo (1957), Seven Phoenixes (Golden Phoenix Versus the Dragon) (1961), and I Want My Country and My Wife Back (1963). The aliens are all from Soviet-bloc sci-fi films of the same period.

Wayang Spaceship, beyond its delicious trippiness, speaks in parable about the ideality of time travel and the longing for a distant home that are often obliquely referenced in filmic and performative representations of the otherworldly. Above the stage, yet another mirrored curtain hangs, reflecting the lights and all that is projected upon the screen below—the sky is yet another screen in this confined world in which all the image rays that spew forth find their reflection and refraction upon each surface. Every territory has been claimed, leaving seemingly no room for the emergence of any new nation-states, only the possibility of new empires that, like the old ones, contract and explode, leaving nothing but the wreckage of memory behind.

— Travis Jeppesen