Days of Our Lives: Reading

2009 - Photography (Photography)

Wong Hoy Cheong

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

Days of Our Lives: Reading is from a series of work was created for the 10th Biennale de Lyon by the artist. It marks a new dimension of his ongoing effort to negotiate with the postcolonial reality across the world, with a unique interventional strategy to deal with the French society. Named after a soap opera in U. S. which has been running practically everyday for over 40 years, Days Of Our Lives is a series of six photographs which explores this new Europeaness. These reenacted photographs or tableaux vivant are based on French painting section in the Museum of Fine Arts (Lyon) which depict domestic scenes: preparing food; relaxing, reading and playing music; giving charity to the poor or being evicted from home or going off to war. They are paintings of ordinary people and their everyday activities and problems.


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 ...

Making Chinatown
© » KADIST

Ming Wong

2012

Making Chinatown (2012) is a remake of Roman Polanski’s 1974 classic neo-noir film Chinatown ...

I Want to be Gentleman
© » KADIST

Lu Chunsheng

2000

Lu has developed an oeuvre that consists of characters in bizarre situations...

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...

Gary Gilpatrick, Insulator
© » KADIST

Sharon Lockhart

2008

Lockhart’s film Lunch Break investigates the present state of American labor through a close look at the everyday life of the workers at the Bath Iron Works shipyard—a private sector of the U...

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....

Nachbau
© » KADIST

Simon Starling

2007

Invited in 2007 to the Museum Folkwang in Essen (Germany), Simon Starling questioned its history: known for its collections and particularly for its early engagement in favor of modern art (including the acquisition and exhibition of works by Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Matisse), then destroyed during the Second World War, the museum was pillaged for its masterpieces of ‘degenerate art’ by the nazis...

Biennale, Dog
© » KADIST

Xu Tan

2003

Biennale, Dog is an appropriation of the posters made to promote biennial art exhibitions...

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...

Untitled (City Limits)
© » KADIST

Allen Ruppersberg

1970

Untitled (City Limits) is a series of five black-and-white photographs of road signs, specifically the signs demarcating city limits of several small towns in California...

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...

7-headed Lalandau Hat
© » KADIST

Yee I-Lann

2020

7-headed Lalandau Hat by Yee I-Lann is an intricately woven sculpture evoking the ceremonial headdress worn by Murut men in Borneo...

Untitled (Sword)
© » KADIST

Shilpa Gupta

2009

In Untitled (Sword) , addressing histories of colonialism with abstraction, a large steel blade extends from the gallery wall...

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...

100 Hand drawn maps of my country, India
© » 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...

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...

Visalia Livestock Market, Visalia, California
© » KADIST

Sharon Lockhart

2011

Visalia Livestock Market, Visalia, California results from Lockhart’s prolonged investigation of an agricultural center and community...

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...