Why Filmmaker Ming Wong Is the Ultimate Shape-Shifter

In the quiet and pious galleries of London’s National Gallery, saints often suffer in silence. But not so in the hands of Huang Ming, who during last year’s residency was given unparalleled access to the museum’s collection of European masterpieces. in his latest film The dance of the sun on the water | Saltatio Solis in the color of waterThe Berlin-based Singaporean artist reimagines Saint Sebastian as a sly, time-traveling figure – queer, cinematic icon and shape-shifter – the third-century Roman centurion and arrow-pierced Christian martyr – split between language, body and history.

“Saint Sebastian is a time traveler, a wonderful vision of a human being whose gender and age seem to change as well,” Huang told art news in a recent interview. “We will all become Sebastian. In turn, we will become destroyers and martyrs.”

exist The dance of the sun on the waterAsian performers of various genders speaking Latin, move among tension-filled afterimages from Derek Jarman’s 1976 film Sebastianrefracted through the National Gallery’s own painted Sebastian, of which there are 14. Actors, often wearing only a loincloth, perform a stylized reenactment of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian in the National Gallery’s ornate marble galleries. They dance, embrace, fight and pose against the backdrop of Renaissance and Baroque masterpieces, reflecting the bound, arrow-pierced figures found in the museum’s historical collection.

Like his metamorphosis Saint Sebastian, Wang made a career out of destroying the seemingly fixed. Born in 1971, he describes his native Singapore as a country “slowly emerging from its colonial stratum”, witnessing rapid urbanization, changes in language policy and the construction of cultural infrastructure in almost real time. Coming from a medical family, he chose art at the age of 15. “I went against people’s expectations,” he said. “I have always been good at art, and when I learned about the state’s plans to develop the arts community, I decided to pursue it seriously.”

Although it was not fashionable in the 1990s, Wong studied traditional Chinese ink painting, calligraphy and literature at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in Singapore. “Basic training proved to be a mind-numbing imitation of the Masters,” he recalls. However, this discipline “provided a window into long-neglected aspects of my cultural heritage.”

He sought release by writing plays in English, which became the basis of his artistic practice. In that store he found “satisfaction” [in] “Playing with language in a postcolonial society,” he said. Movies can also educate. He watched Hong Kong melodramas, Hollywood noirs, Bollywood musicals and Singaporean variety shows. “As a young queer kid, a lot of times you have to identify with characters of different cultural backgrounds, genders, body types or nationalities,” he said. “Of course, it’s all about desire and forming one’s identity.”

After moving to London to study for an MA at the Slade School of Fine Arts, University College London, Wang began inserting himself into classic Western films by Douglas Sirk, Roman Polanski or Pier Paolo Pasolini, playing each role himself despite lacking formal acting training. exist imitation of lifeThe play debuted at the Singapore pavilion at the 2009 Venice Biennale and received a special mention from the Golden Lion jury. Actors from Singapore’s main ethnic groups recur in Wong Kar-Wai’s adaptation of Sirk’s 1959 melodrama. imitation of lifesubverting race, gender and identity.

“I study, replicate and reinterpret the cinematic artworks of directors whose visions and achievements are important to me,” he said. “I look for ways to tell stories and test ways of reading, listening, seeing, experiencing stories—the ways in which humans create meaning for themselves when looking at a painting or experiencing a work of art.”

Poor casting is Wong’s signature tactic. exist Anxiety Essen/Eating Fear (2008), in which he played an elderly housekeeper who falls in love with a Moroccan migrant worker in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1974 romance anxiety eisensiler aufat the same time Next Year/L’Année Prochaine (2016), in which he played the male and female characters in Alain Resnais’ 1961 thriller Last year in Marienbad. Like a chameleon, he can play both the seducer and the seduced with ease, depending on the project.

“Much of my work involves placing myself in situations and environments that I’m not a part of,” he explains, noting that, in a future project, he is currently examining the transpacific migration of Cantonese opera from Hong Kong to North America and its collision with Hollywood and early country music. “Right now, I’m paying attention to what’s happening between China and the United States.”

Huang is not concerned with creating something new or original, his goal is to change what we already know. “Over the years, I’ve come to understand how the concept of originality or authenticity can be reduced to just one node in an interlocking chain of cause and effect,” he said. “In the digital age, the hierarchy of masters and copies or originals and copies feels increasingly irrelevant. What I aim for now is a fluid collage of media—unstable, changing, always changing.”

He describes his process as relatively simple: “Observe, think, experiment, ask, repeat.” But the results are formally complex: multi-channel videos, theatrical sets, karaoke lounges, mirrored stages. His installations, which draw on Chinese opera, science fiction films, promotional films and Cantonese pop music, often resemble a stage: a frame within a frame, collapsing inside and out.

This reflective layering culminates in his National Gallery installation. “My role is to constantly question what we look at and how we look at it,” Huang said. “Levels of meaning keep sliding across time and space. What you think you know so well can be fragile and unstable.”

exist The dance of the sun on the waterLatin became both a sacred language and a profane text, Asian bodies inhabited European martyrdoms, and Jarman’s gay desert became an echo of the absurd in a London museum. The 23-minute film culminates in a striking ritual scene in which each actor takes turns playing the role of a martyr, symbolically shot with arrows by other performers, who also cycle through the role of archers.

In merging East and West, Wong sees Singapore and its history as playing a crucial role in what he wants to achieve. “It can be an advantage not to be in the dominant field or the mainstream, but to be seen from the margins or as an outsider,” he said, noting that as a “crossroads of major unique cultures and immigration routes” where the “art of code-switching” becomes part of everyday life, Singapore can be an instructive model.

In many ways, this is similar to what Huang sees as the role of the artist. “More than ever, society needs artists and artistic thinking,” he said, “to question the entire world, to provoke thought, reflection and discussion, and to discover ways of communicating beyond language. Artists can challenge logic and reasoning and dare to enter unknown and unexplored territories.”