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...
Mario Garcia Torres films a game of Charades among professional actors guessing the former North Korean dictator’s favorite Hollywood films...
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...
Untitled (Women) (2011) presents a startlingly succinct history of violently romanticized femininity...
Long Long Live (2013) takes the viewer to the setting of the Oasis Villa on Green Island, once a reform and re-education prison to house political prisoners during Taiwan’s martial law period...
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 work Calendars is composed of 1001 images of deserted public areas in Singapore printed on pages of a calendar set from the year of 2020 until 2096...
Re: Looking marks a new phase in Wong’s work which connects his region’s history with other parts of the world...
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...
Empire’s Borders II – Passage and Empire’s Borders II – Workers are from the three-channel film installation Empire’s Borders II – Western Enterprise, Inc...
Justice (2014) presents viewers with a curious assemblage: a wooden gallows with slightly curved spindles protruding from the topmost plank, which in turn is covered with rudimentary netting, the threads slackly dangling like a loose spider’s web or an rib cage that’s been cracked open...
Mario Garcia Torres imagines cinematic devices to replay stories occasionally forgotten by Conceptual art...
Days of Our Lives: Reading is from a series of work was created for the 10th Biennale de Lyon by the artist...
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...