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...
Untitled (Women) (2011) presents a startlingly succinct history of violently romanticized femininity...
7-headed Lalandau Hat by Yee I-Lann is an intricately woven sculpture evoking the ceremonial headdress worn by Murut men in Borneo...
Untitled (rolled up) , is an abstract portrait of Owen Monk, the artist’s father and features an aluminum ring of 56.6 cm in diameter measuring 1.77 cm in circumference, the size of his father...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Mario Garcia Torres imagines cinematic devices to replay stories occasionally forgotten by Conceptual art...
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...
Ponderosa Pine IV belongs to a series of large-scale photographs of trees taken by Graham and depicts a particular species that live in Northern California...
Physical and mental exploration have been founding elements in Joachim Koester’s research for several years...
Concerned with the early history of Singapore, Zai Kuning spent many years living with and researching the history of the Riau peoples who were the first inhabitants of Singapore...