Variable dimensions
Making Chinatown (2012) is a remake of Roman Polanski’s 1974 classic neo-noir film Chinatown . According to Wong, the latter is a “textbook” of Hollywood filmmaking . In Ming’s version, he plays all four main characters portrayed originally by Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, John Huston, and Belinda Palmer, shooting against a backdrop of a film set reproduced as wallpaper in a gallery space. Presented as a seven-channel video installation, Making Chinatown is an immersive viewing experience with different scenarios, lines of conversation, and background music, all merged together into one space where the sense of time collapses. The ending fades to black with no reference of the original film’s site, precisely echoing the fictional nature of Chinatown as a no-place, constructed in an often-detached cultural context.
Ming Wong’s practice has a profound connection with world cinema. Constantly drawing from classic films, Wong investigates issues around identity, linguistics, translation, dislocation, and history through reenactments of well-known films. Often using a deliberately low-budget aesthetic, he restages the films by appropriating and recontextualizing the main storylines and characters. The compelling cultural imaginary created in his films brings forward and wittily satirizes the undermined codes that constitute the infrastructure of our society.
The Cloud of Unknowing (2011) is titled after a 14th-century medieval treatise on faith, in which “the cloud of unknowing” that stands between the aspirant and God can only be evoked by the senses, rather than the rational mind...
In the series Horizons (2010), Lipps uses appropriation to riff on Modernism’s fascination with abstract form...
Walking Through is one of a series of videos—sometimes humorous, often absurd—that record the artist’s performative interactions with objects in a particular site...
With a habit of reading eight to ten books at the same time, Chong paints his two-foot tall novel covers through referencing an extensive reading list (accessible on Facebook) he has kept since 2006...
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...
The first iteration of Flutter was specifically conceived for the Pro Arts Gallery space in Oakland in 2010, viewable from the public space of a sidewalk, and the version acquired by the Kadist Collection is an adaptation of it...
In Up All Night, Waiting for the Chelsea Hotel Magic to Spark My Creativity Mario García Torres constructs and documents a hypothetical scene, situating himself within a lineage of artists and creatives that used to congregate at the historic hotel...
Days of Our Lives: Reading is from a series of work was created for the 10th Biennale de Lyon by the artist...
Tree on the Former Site of Camera Obscura (1996) belongs to a series of large-scale photographs of trees taken by Graham and depicts a particular species that lives in Northern California...
This artwork was part of a group of projects presented in the Japanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2013...
War Footage is a series of wall-mounted works composed of 16mm film leader, tightly bound to flag-shaped panels by the artist...
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...
Los rastreadores is a two-channel video by Claudia Joskowicz narrating the story of a fictitious drug lord, Ernesto Suarez, whose character is based on the well-known Bolivian drug dealer, Roberto Suárez...
Untitled (Perfect Lovers + 1) by Cerith Wyn Evans takes as its starting point Felix Gonzales-Torres’s seminal work Untitled (Perfect Lovers) , in which two clocks were synchronized and left to run without interference, the implication being that one would stop before the other...
Converting is a piece about the Orang Laut, often called Sea Nomads, that inhabited the Riau archipelago...
Mario Garcia Torres imagines cinematic devices to replay stories occasionally forgotten by Conceptual art...