The presentation examines the work of Singaporean artist Ming Wong and his selected videos that deal with identity, gender and displacement. Wong’s works are concerned with the ways the artist’s body and his queerness inhabit and move across familiar, national and diasporic locations. Wong’s videos re-create different layers of cinematic languages, social structure, gender and identity and his own re-telling of world cinema.

In these videos, he ‘mis-casts’ himself and other performers by re-interpreting iconic films and performances, sometimes playing male and female roles himself, often in languages foreign to him. Working through the visual styles and tropes of such iconic film directors as Fassbinder, Wong Kar-wai, Visconti, Pasolini, Douglas Sirk, Ingmar Bergman and Polanski, Wong’s practice considers the means through which subjectivity and geographic location are constructed by motion pictures.

About the Speaker

Arthur Laing Ming Wong is a PhD candidate at the Department of Cultural and Religious studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) working on his dissertation on Cosmopolitan Subject in Artistic Practice: The Case of Overseas Singaporean Artists. In 2011, he graduated from the Master of Cultural Management programme at CUHK, and played an active role in Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong art scenes for several years prior to his PhD studies. From 2007 - 2010, he worked as Management Assistant Officer at NUS Museum, a museum focused on regional art and culture at the National University of Singapore.