Ming Wong studied Chinese Art at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Singapore, and Fine Art Media at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. Wongs videos and installations explore the intersections of language, identity, and performance. In his signature methodology, he casts himself as every character in a storyplaying male and female roles as well as characters of different ages and racesand mimics various behaviours, right down to learning different languages. Though untrained as an actor, he has embarked on an artistic practice that is at once highly influenced by cinema and is in constant dialogue with measures of performativity, gender, and difference. Wong represented Singapore at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009 and is the recipient of the Distinguished Alumni Medal 2012.
Windows on the World (Part 1) (2014, 3’02”)
Window on the World (Part 1) is a work that forms part of the artists long-term endeavor on the unconscious relationships between sci-fi and Cantonese opera, the structure built in the exhibition departs from the oceanic landscape appearing in Tarkovskys Solaris (1972) and its infinite horizon of islets. In this work the vortex of space conquest collides with the vortex of antiquity, becoming a site where a Chinese sci-fi plot is imagined. The work was originally commissioned by Para Site and Spring Workshop for the group exhibition Islands Off the Shores of Asia and is made in collaboration with Thomas Tsang / DeHow Projects.