Staging Identities, Performing Plurality

Ming Wong's mononoaware

World cinema and its popular development from the late 50s to 70s is the device that Singapore-born artist Ming Wong deploys as a performative strategy to engage communicative disjunctions which occur across cultures.

Mononoaware (Japanese, 'the pathos of things'), a showcase of videos, posters and photographs by Ming Wong, questions approximations of identity and authenticity, 'foreignness' and 'local-ness'.

In his appropriation of world cinema as both metaphor and device, the usage and reception of different languages is a vulnerable, mispronounceable cultural process that may just as readily yield to misunderstanding as it may register moments of empathy and recognition, which admits to inherent social mores and assumptions which persist despite the embracing of a ‘global identity’.

Four Malay Stories (2005), comprises re-enactments of four films directed by little remembered Malay-Muslim showbiz icon P. Ramlee from the pioneering era of cinematic history which flourished during the late 50s and 60s in Singapore and Malaysia. Deriving from Wong's theatrical background and typical of his oeuvre, the artist features as the sole actor who plays the entire cast of 16 characters, repeating his lines in the Malay language, crossing demographics of age, sex and ethnicity. 

This insertion of himself as a unifying thread across race, sex and age serves as a device to retain a reflective space to re-examine the notion of 'otherness' and where perimeters of identity, of 'becoming', are as shiftable and as stageable as markers of identity can be - with the help of props and a costume wardrobe.

Rainer W. Fassbinder's not unhumourous profession that "I don't believe that melodramatic feelings are laughable, they should be taken absolutely seriously", resounds in Wong's Angst Essen / Eat Fear (2008) - a tribute to Fassbinder's Angst Essen Seele Auf (Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, 1973), which lays bare the shadows of xenophobia. Wong re-enacts the tragic melodrama of Ali, a Moroccan foreign labourer in Germany and his older wife Emmi, a local cleaner, once again playing all the parts in a foreign language.

Eliza Tan, curator