Ming Wong represents the Singapore Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale in the solo show, ‘Life of Imitation’.

Noted for engaging the performative veneers of language and identity in his re-interpretations of ‘national cinema’, Berlin-based Ming Wong revisits Singapore’s golden age cinema in the 50s and 60s - hitherto little known to the world – and unveils the legacy of the country’s socio-political flux and multi-ethnic relations before its Independence in 1965.

The Singapore Pavilion, located within a 14th-century palazzo on the Grand Canal near the Rialto, is transformed into a cinematic Wunderkammerwhere both archival and re-invented materials, the real and the fictional, co-habit.

Ming Wong invites us into worlds of shifting surfaces, in 3 multi-screen video installations with sly and comic incarnations of speech, gesture and role-playing that reveal the processes of parroting and becoming.

In Four Malay Stories (2005), the artist portrays a spectrum of 16 stock characters from films by P. Ramlee, the Wunderkind of Malay cinema in Singapore in the 60s.

His new work Life of Imitation features 3 actors from the 3 main ethnic groups in Singapore (Chinese, Malay, Indian) taking turns to play a black mother and her ‘white’ daughter in a scene from Douglas Sirk’s Hollywood melodrama ‘Imitation of Life’ (1959).

In another new work In Love for the Mood, the artist has a Caucasian actress playing the 2 lovers in Wong Kar Wai’s meditation on love and infidelity set in Hong Kong in the 60s, ‘In the Mood for Love’ (2000).

As the videos loop, we discern the actors’ slippages in guise and stance. The imperfections of imitation resonate with the historical Singaporean condition related to roots and hybridity.

The videos are set up as site-responsive installations in the 6-room palazzo, alongside invited artworks by Mr Neo Chon Teck (Singapore’s last cinema billboard painter), Mr Wong Han Min (private collector of cine-memorabilia), and Sherman Ong (documentary-maker).

Contributors to the exhibition catalogue include curators Hu Fang, Russell Storer and Susanne Prinz, and film critics Benjamin McKay and Ben Slater.

The curator of the Singapore Pavilion is Tang Fu Kuen.

Ming Wong (b. 1971, Singapore) creates digital media installations that explore slippages in language, performativity and cross-cultural experiences through the appropriation of iconic moments in world cinema.

Originally trained in traditional Chinese painting, Ming Wong also made a name for himself as a playwright in the Singapore theatre scene, before obtaining his Masters in fine art media at the Slade School of Art in London.

Currently based in Berlin where he completed a year-long artist residency programme at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, he has recently presented solo exhibitions at MKgalerie in Berlin and Rotterdam, and Gallery 4A in Sydney; his works have also been shown in the past year at the Jakarta Biennale, Images Festival in Toronto, Art Forum Berlin, Preview Berlin, ZKM Center for Art & Media in Karlsruhe, Centro Cultural Montehermoso in Vitoria-Gasteiz, Singapore Art Museum, S1 Artspace in Sheffield, Galleria neon>campobase in Bologna, etc.

He is represented by MKgalerie in Berlin and Rotterdam.

www.mingwong.org

Ming Wong:Life of Imitation

Singapore Pavilion at 53rd Venice Biennale International Art Exhibition