Los Angeles

Ming Wong

In his videos and installations, the Berlin-based Singaporean artist Ming Wong explores the performative veneers of language, identity and performance through his own ‘world cinema’. His performance-videos show “everyday life cinema” as a stage for queer politics of representation and combines it with the story of a melodrama by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, P. Ramlees or modern dance. The artist’s most disruptive gesture is what he calls “impostoring”: by the insertion of people traditionally excluded from cinematic representation into cinema’s traditional tropes he endows those devices with new and often unsettling meanings. 

Ming Wong, born 1971, is a Singaporean based in Berlin and Singapore and a graduate of the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts and the Slade School of Art. Selected solo exhibitions include Bülent Wongsoy: Biji Diva at carlier gebauer in Berlin (2014), Travaux domestiques at CAN: Centre d’art Neuchâtel in Neuchâtel (2013), Me in Me at Shiseido Gallery in Tokyo (2013) and Ming Wong: Making Chinatown at REDCAT in Los Angeles (2012). Selected group shows include Give Us The Future at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein in Berlin (2014), Double Indemnity at Cornerhouse in Manchester (2013), 12th Biennale de Lyon at La Sucrière in Lyon (2013), Kann es Liebe sein? At Künstlerhaus Wien and Cercle Cité in Luxembourg (2012), The Liverpool Biennial (2012), Persona Performa at Performa 11 at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York (2011), Rollenbilder – Rollenspiele at the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg (2011), Invisibleness is Visibleness at MOCA in Taipei (2011) and based in Berlin at Atelierhaus Monbijoupark in Berlin (2011). In 2009 he represented Singapore at the 53rd Venice Biennale and was awarded a special mention by the jury. He received the Wollita Kulturpreis in 2008.