Days of Our Lives: Playing for Dying Mother

2009 - Photography (Photography)

Wong Hoy Cheong

location: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
year born: 1960
gender: male
nationality: Malaysian
home town: George Town, Malaysia

Created for the tenth Lyon Bienniale, in Days of Our Lives: Playing for Dying Mother, Wong’s ongoing negotiation of postcolonial globalization takes aim at French society. Named after an American daytime soap opera that been running for over forty years, Days of Our Lives is a series of six photographs that explore contemporary Europeaness. Here, domestic, everyday scenes drawn from French paintings in the Museum of Fine Arts in Lyon——preparing food, relaxing, reading and playing music, giving charity to the poor, being evicted from home, or going off to War—are reenacted by Muslim Nigerians, Iranians, Turkish, and Buddhist Burmese minorities.


Born in Malaysia, Wong Hoy Cheong’s work examines the formation of his country’s multicultural identity vis-à-vis global migration, trade, colonialism, and the postcolonial circulation of people, ideas, and capital. His extended body of work uses various media—drawing, painting, performance, installation, video, and on-line projects—to critique the impact of these developments on contemporary life within and without South Asia. With the increasingly hegemonic domination of the media industry in everyday life, its systems of representation have become a central issue in Wong’s recent work, which oscillates between reality and fiction, irony and transgression—and gains a new strength in the process.


Colors:



Other related works, blended automatically

Re: Looking
© » KADIST

Wong Hoy Cheong

2004

Re: Looking marks a new phase in Wong’s work which connects his region’s history with other parts of the world...

n°5 The International Sail
© » KADIST

Enrique Ramirez

2017

Ramirez’s The International Sail is the fifth in a series that features an upside-down worn out, mended and fragmented boat sail...

La Memoria Verde
© » KADIST

Enrique Ramirez

2019

Enrique Ramirez’s La Memoria Verde is a work of poetry, politics, and memory created in response to the curatorial statement for the 13th Havana Biennial in 2019, The Construction of the Possible ...

100 Hand drawn maps of my country, Tel Aviv / Jerusalem
© » KADIST

Shilpa Gupta

2014

These hand drawn maps are part of an ongoing series begun in 2008 in which Gupta asks ordinary people to sketch outlines of their home countries by memory...

An-My Lê on Vietnam, the Chaos of War, and the Tangibility of Memory
© » APERTURE

An-My LE

For the past two decades, An-My Lê has used photography to examine her personal history and the legacies of US military power, probing the tension between experience and storytelling....

History of Chemistry I
© » KADIST

Lu Chunsheng

2004

A mesmerizing experience of a vaguely familiar yet remote world, History of Chemistry I follows a group of men as they wander from somewhere beyond the edge of the sea through a vast landscape to an abandoned steel factory...

Men (055, 065)
© » KADIST

Elad Lassry

2012

The black-and-white photograph Men (055, 065) (2012) depicts two similarly built young men – young and slim, with dark tousled hair and a square jaw line – seated aside one another in identical outfits...

Exquisite Eco Living (executive Properties series)
© » KADIST

Vincent Leong

2012

The photograph Exquisite Eco Living is part of a larger series titled Executive Properties in which he digitally manipulated the images to insert iconic buildings of Kuala Lumpur in the view of derelict spaces also found in the city...

Chocolate Bars, Eggs, Milk
© » KADIST

Elad Lassry

2013

In his composition, Chocolate Bars, Eggs, Milk, Lassry’s subjects are mirrored in their surroundings (both figuratively, through the chocolate colored backdrop and the brown frame; and literally, in the milky white, polished surface of the table), as the artist plays with color, shape, and the conventions of representational art both within and outside of the photographic tradition...

Floor, Legs
© » KADIST

Elad Lassry

2013

In establishing a deliberate distance between viewer and subject, Lassry raises questions about representation itself and how all portraits are, in effect, fully constructed objects that only gain meaning once we ascribe them with our own personal associations and emotions...

Herculine's Profecy
© » KADIST

Juliana Huxtable

2017

Herculine’s Prophecy by Juliana Huxtable features a kneeling demon-figure on what appears to be a screen-print, placed on a wooden table, which has then been photographed and digitally altered to appear like a book cover, with a title and subtitle across the top, and a poem written across the bottom...

PANGKIS
© » KADIST

Yee I-Lann

2021

PANGKIS by Yee I-Lann is a looped video performance...

Untitled (Men)
© » KADIST

Matt Lipps

2011

In the series Horizons (2010), Lipps uses appropriation to riff on Modernism’s fascination with abstract form...

Patient Admission, US Naval Hospital Ship Mercy, Vietnam
© » KADIST

An-My LE

2010

The print Patient Admission, US Naval Hospital Ship Mercy, Vietnam (2010) features an Asian Buddhist monk and an American Navy Solider on board the Mercy ship –one of the two dedicated hospital ships of the United States Navy– sitting upright in their chairs and adopting the same posture...

Un hombre que camina (A Man Walking)
© » KADIST

Enrique Ramirez

In Un Hombre que Camina (A Man Walking) (2011-2014), the sense of rhythm and timing is overpowered by the colossal sense of timelessness of this peculiar place...

Round and Round and Consumed by Fire
© » KADIST

Claudia Joskowicz

2009

The primary interest in the trilogy is Joskowicz’s use of cinematic space, with long tracking shots that portray resistance to habitual viewing experiences of film and television...

Michigan Central Station
© » KADIST

Stan Douglas

1997

Michigan Central Station is part of a larger photographic series, Detroit Photos , which includes images of houses, theaters, stadiums, offices, and other municipal structures...

Ghost games
© » KADIST

Anri Sala

2002

Ghost Games , follows the enigmatic dance of crabs “steered” by a flashlight in the night of darkness of a South American beach...

Vallegrande 1967
© » KADIST

Claudia Joskowicz

2008

The primary interest in the trilogy is Joskowicz’s use of cinematic space, with long tracking shots that portray resistance to habitual viewing experiences of film and television...

Untitled (Don’t See, Don’t Hear, Don’t Speak)
© » KADIST

Shilpa Gupta

2008

The three monkeys in Don’t See, Don’t Hear, Don’t Speak are a recurring motif in Gupta’s work and refer to the Japanese pictorial maxim of the “three wise monkeys” in which Mizaru covers his eyes to “see no evil,” Kikazaru covers his ears to “hear no evil,” and Iwazaru covers his mouth to “speak no evil.” For the various performative and photographic works that continue this investigation and critique of the political environment, Gupta stages children and adults holding their own or each other’s eyes, mouths and ears...