Cosmic Theatre: Ming Wong

Ota Fine Arts Tokyo is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Singaporean-born, Berlin-based artist Ming Wong. This is the artist’s second solo exhibition at Ota Fine Arts, following the first one in Singapore earlier this year. Wong is known for his use of performance, video, installation and photography to create works inspired by films and popular culture, layered with people's identities, social structures and cinematic language. In recent years, he has been exploring Cantonese opera, a popular traditional entertainment for the Chinese. In this exhibition, the artist's video, photographs and collage prints focus on the relationship between the modernisation of Cantonese opera and the development of science fiction in mainland China.

The video work presented in this exhibition was first exhibited in Wayang Spaceship, a large-scale outdoor installation commissioned by the Singapore Art Museum in 2022, which Wong created. Here, "wayang" refers to Chinese street opera in Singapore, which is performed on a makeshift wooden stage. It is also used as slang for deliberate theatricality. Next to a container site that hints towards the country's history of development through trade and immigration, Wong had set up a Wayang stage made with metallic, reflective materials that mimic a spaceship. Shown on a screen surrounded by rainbow-coloured fluorescent lights was a video collage that merged Cantonese opera footage from the 1950s to the 1970s with sci-fi films and his own video works. The protagonist, a scholar warrior - Wong's alter ego - embarks on a journey in the Wayang Spaceship through time, space and gender, in a strange trance created by a remix of Cantonese opera music, sci-fi sound effects, and flickering lights.

The photographic work series Astro Girl, created in 2015, was derived from Windows On The World (Part 1), which was presented at the alternative art space Para Site in Hong Kong in 2014. The installation consists of a spaceship set reminiscent of a combination of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, and a video of Wong in a spacesuit moving slowly through the ship with background music from a Cantonese opera aria. Just as in Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris, when the protagonist sees the planet's uncharted sea stirring from inside the ship, the female astronaut played by Wong peers out of the window with an uneasy look on her face. In a sci-fi set made of simple materials such as wood and cloth, a futuristic Cantonese opera is performed within an unsettling atmosphere. The scene may be described as a merging of the envisioning towards outer space for mankind’s progress and future, with the formation of a subjective Chinese identity that is reflected in Cantonese opera.

A new series of collage prints, presented in Wong’s solo exhibition at Ota Fine Arts in Singapore in January this year, blends Cantonese opera and notions of sci-fi similarly. Wong combines traditional Chinese ink in monochrome brushstrokes with found portrait photographs of wayang actors and Soviet sci-fi illustrations of the same period, overlaid with rainbow-coloured holograms. Beyond this visual layering, the printed collages are made up of multiple, diverse layers contextually - cross-dressing actors, traditional characters from the Cantonese opera with bilateral identities such as the scholar-warrior, and sci-fi magazines which were brought to Germany via Poland from second-hand booksellers in Ukraine - creating a unique and suggestive retrofuturism.

The transformation of tradition to suit the time and place as seen in Cantonese opera, and the world of sci-fi that embodies space as a new frontier that was once dreamt of – these elements, which are common to the works presented in this exhibition, recall the history of Singapore, where culture has been shaped by immigration and modern technology. Moreover, as in Wong's ongoing explorations, the actor, whose work transcends cultures, borders, time and genders, prompts reflection on socially-imposed roles and the identities that have been constructed by those roles. Departing from the harbour of Singapore to the open seas of space and landing in Roppongi, Wayang Spaceship is a theatre where the future can be glimpsed from the past. An exhilarating experience of sound, colour and visuals, the theatre is an invitation to be drawn into 'another world'.