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Ming Wong
Learning German with Petra von Kant, DVD diptych 2007

Ming Wong
Learning German with Petra von Kant, DVD diptych 2007

Ming Wong
Ham and Cheese, 2006, stills from DVD

Ming Wong
Whodunnit, 2006,video still

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Ming Wong

Lerne Deutsch mit Petra von Kant

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Ming Wong’s practice explores the performative veneers of language and identity through the moving image. The artist plays a mélange of roles for the camera, often donning the plural personas of actors, actresses and their screen parts, at other times assuming the director’s chair. Lerne Deutsch mit Petra von Kant (2007), a re-enactment of scenes from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), presents Ming Wong in the role of German actress Margit Carstensen and her character. He deliberates the translation of personal subjectivities through speech and motion in a language new to himself by performing one of his favourite German films.
By crossing elements of theatrical arrangement, cinematic history and its narrative fictions with biography, Ming Wong’s video works probe into notions of individual transculturation alongside societal acculturation. A recurrent device in his work, the monologue, which expresses the interior spectrum of an individual is juxtaposed with the notion of dialogue as a rendezvous of contingent cultural determinants and exterior articulations. Gestures and utterances occur as emotive indices that describe fluid states of selves and situations, criss-crossing the chessboard dynamics of social relations. In deliberating the surfaces and sub-surfaces of a staged event, constructed persona and the candid moment, Ming Wong’s work conveys the effervescence of ‘becomings’ with glistening acuity.

Eliza Tan