Ming Wong: Pictures from the Wayang Spaceship

Ota Fine Arts Singapore is delighted to present "Pictures from the Wayang Spaceship", the first solo exhibition by Ming Wong in Singapore in over a decade, featuring new photographic collage prints inspired by his decade-long exploration into the relationship between the history of Chinese opera on stage and screen and notions of futurity and science fiction.  

Developed in conjunction with the arrival of the 'Wayang Spaceship', a site-specific commissioned work for Singapore Art Museum at Tanjong Pagar Distripark, this exhibition opens up a portal to otherworldly vistas populated by time-travelling heroes and players of Wayang.

The images are crafted from layers of found photographs of Wayang actors from Singapore and Malaysia from the 1950s-70s, illustrations of Soviet space exploration and science fiction from the same period sourced from Ukrainian booksellers, Chinese brush paintings and dichroic films that change colour at different angles. The spectacular, speculative scenographies recall images from Stanley Kubrick´s 2001: A Space Odyssey as well as Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris, but where genderbending, time-travelling Wayang actors take center stage, asserting their position at the intersection of tradition/ technology/ gender of a transnational, multidimensional, futurist opera.

The Singapore-born, Berlin-based artist won a Special Mention at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009 for his solo presentation at the Singapore Pavilion. His works are currently on display at the Tate Modern in London, and will also be shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from March 2023.