Ming Wong: LIFE OF IMITATION

Ming Wong: LIFE OF IMITATION, an award-winning exhibition by the Berlin-based Singaporean artist Ming Wong, will have its American premiere at the Frye Art Museum on January 22. First presented at the 2009 Venice Biennale, where it won a Special Jury Mention award, the exhibition features multiscreen video installations; billboards by Neo Chon Teck, Singapore’s last surviving billboard painter; rare screen memorabilia; and photographs of cinema palaces. This exhibition, Ming Wong’s first in the United States, has been co-organized by the Singapore Art Museum and the Frye Art Museum.

In his installations Wong adapts landmark films of world cinema, such as Douglas Sirk’s Hollywood melodrama Imitation of Life (1959), addressing issues of racial identity, gender, language, and that which the artist refers to as “in-between, bittersweet, where you don’t know whether to laugh or cry.” In Love for the Mood, a “rehearsal of a rehearsal,” is Ming Wong’s tribute to Wong Kar-wai’s Hong Kong film In the Mood for Love (2000), set in the 1960s. Finally, Four Malay Stories reinterprets Malay showbiz icon P. Ramlee’s most famous films, with Wong himself playing sixteen stock characters in a comedy, a melodrama, a social drama, and a period drama.

Ming Wong rereads “national” cinema constructed through language and role-playing by re-interpreting and adapting classic films and engaging with performative notions of miscasting and parroting.