Wong Ping’s Fables 1

- Film & Video (Film & Video)

13:00 minutes

Wong Ping

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Artist Wong Ping’s madcap video, Wong Ping’s Fables 1 , might at first appear to resemble a crazy screensaver. Grid-like patterns allude to the work’s deep digital structure, while comic-book imagery illustrates a set of curious moral parables. The video tells the story of three flawed characters named Elephant, Chicken, and Tree. Elephant is an intellectual who discovers second sight; Chicken is a police officer with Tourettes Syndrome who accidentally kills his family; and Tree is a bus passenger forced to confront his darkest fears. They are flawed characters, and Ping annotates each of their stories with a short critical maxim. The artist notes that the traditional fable provides an aphorism that is not unlike that of the artist statement – oftening attempting to explain something that does not need further explanation. Like much of Wong’s work, Wong Ping’s Fables 1 reflects on the anxiety and aggressions of Hong Kong’s younger generations, presenting a somewhat dystopian prognosis. His narratives tell strange tales that might be difficult to watch, were they not rendered in animated form. The visual and auditory narrations often explicitly touch upon sex, lust, eroticism, politics, and broader social relations. Wong’s video discusses his observations of a society with repressed sexuality, personal sentiments, and political limitations, using a visual language that sits on the border of shocking and amusing.

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Obscenity and profound issues of contemporary society are not mutually exclusive in Wong Ping’s video works. His neon-hued animations imagine salacious narratives based on the artist’s real life encounters and observations, tapping into our deepest desires, fantasies, and repressed sentiments. Wong’s work forces its audiences to reassess their internalized standards of decency in its razor sharp critiques and existential inquiries. Teetering between perverse honesty and vulgarity, complex vignettes of individual relations in contemporary society are delivered as lurid, visually vibrant representations in an 8-bit video game aesthetic. Wong’s signature visual language is especially effective in masking social taboos packed with observations on repressed sexuality, obsession, social relations, political limitations, and cultural etiquette. Wong’s work carefully considers immense proposals concerning control structures, desire, sexuality, shame, masculinity, Hong Kong society, and digital ontologies in a way that is neither indexical nor allegorical. Rather, Wing’s work poses an uncomfortable middle ground, equally filled with the uncomfortable dialectic between smut and criticality.

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Colors:

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• moral.n.01
• fabrication.n.01
• identity.n.01
• wit.n.01
• sex.n.04