Winter Theatre: Li Ran, Ming Wong, Samson Young
Ota Fine Arts Shanghai is delighted to present Winter Theatre, a group exhibition featuring artists, Li Ran, Ming Wong, and Samson Young. The exhibition looks at the ways in which these artists convey identities and construct narratives.
In many of Ming Wong's (b. 1971, Singapore) video works, he plays all of the characters, challenging his viewers to reimagine societal structures, identities and gender, and pushing the possibilities of cinematic language. After Chinatown (2012) explores the symbolism of Chinatown as a cinematic symbol. Inspired by the famous ending line in Roman Polanski's masterpiece "Chinatown", "Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown.", Ming created several video works in 2012 with Chinatown as an entry point.
In After Chinatown, Wong plays the roles of a detective and a femme fatale, wearing a mask or a wig and sunglasses, imitating the stereotypes of classic film noir and shuttling through the architectures of "Chinatown" in scenes shot in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Hong Kong. The two protagonists seem to be looking for somebody, reflecting the tumultuous times of Chinese migration in the 20th century. At the intersection of time and place, "Chinatown" becomes a state of mind that reflects the collective unconscious of individuals that are part of a continuum, connected and distorted by one's destiny, history, geography, and cultural legacy.
In Ham&cheeseomelet (2001), Wong wears a moustache, wig and an Elizabethan ruff made of paper frills as he recites the classic phrase "To be, or not to be, that is the question" from Shakespeare's Hamlet. However, Wong's speech is repeatedly cut, edited and distorted. This phrase that was meant to convey Hamlet's struggle as he contemplates life or death loses its original context. Wong reimagines William Shakespeare's Hamlet, playfully disrupting classic English literature and illustrating the instability of language as medium.
Li Ran (b. 1986, China) also appears in his video work. In Another Modern Artist (2013), Li plays the role of a fictional modernist artist, with background music and a broadcasting-style narration that is reminiscent of black and white films from the 1930s and 1940s. Speaking loudly and confidently, Li Ran combines the confusions, explorations in artistic practice and the historical circumstances of his father's generation with his own thoughts on the current art sphere, exploring the identity of artists and the subjectivity of discourse in global contemporary art.
Last but not least, Samson Young (b. 1979, Hong Kong, China) chose the lion dance, a folk culture with a history of nearly 2000 years, as the subject of his video Muted Situation #2: Muted Lion Dance (2014). Unlike traditional lion dance performances, the sound of the drums, cymbals and gongs that accompanies the performance is deliberately "muted". The only sounds that can be heard are made by the lion dancers as they perform: sounds caused by the rubbing of the fabrics, the breathing sounds of the lion dancers, the stomping of footsteps and other background sounds. By removing the sounds that audiences perceive or expect to hear in a familiar setting, Young shifts our focus towards sounds that are often ignored or marginalized. Dominant and familiar sounds are muted, presenting the audience with an opportunity to re-imagine a dissimilar soundscape.
Ota Fine Arts Shanghai invites all to experience the fresh perspectives of these artists in the way that they explore the different types of connections among culture, history, and identity
