Ming Wong: Vain Efforts

SYDNEY. 6 MARCH – 18 APRIL 2009. 

Vain Efforts is a solo exhibition of recent work by Ming Wong, and is his first solo exhibition in Australia. Timed to coincide with the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Festival, Vain Efforts is a key element of 4A’s 2009 program of international contemporary Asian art. Vain Efforts also includes a one-night only screening of key video works by Ming Wong as part of 4A’s Cinema Alley, an offsite street ‘cinema’ initiative for contemporary video art.

Wong lives between his native Singapore and Berlin, working mainly in video and photography. He creates works that have both irreverent and serious outcomes, exploring slippages in language, cross-cultural experiences and gender stereotyping through appropriation of iconic 20th Century cinema, including influential German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Angst essen Seele auf / Fear Eats the Soul  (1973). Wong’s Angst Essen / Eat Fear  (2008) is a rendition of the Fassbinder film, as Wong plays both leading characters, a sixty year old German woman and a Moroccan immigrant who are involved in an ill-fated romance. Wong’s reworking of the film emphasises its themes of racial prejudice and economic inequality, whilst recontextualising the narrative within the contemporary experiences of people living in ethnically diverse societies.

Vain Efforts also included Wong’s Filem-Filem-Filem  (2008), a major work commissioned by the Singapore Fringe Festival that was developed from the artist’s research into old cinemas built during the sixties in Malaysia and Singapore. The work features Polaroid shots of ‘grand’ and ‘modernist’ buildings which were at the heart of a growing film industry in the two countries. The images present an unusual insight into cultural pluralism in the days pre- and post-independence in the 1950s and 1960s.

Ming Wong: Vain Effots has been sponsored by the City of Sydney and supported by the NSW Government through ARTS NSW. The project has been made possible by the support of the National Arts Council Singapore, ARTCELL and is an event of the 2009 Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras.

Born in 1971 in Singapore, Ming Wong trained in Chinese Art at the Nanyang Academy from 1992 to 1995. He obtained a Masters of Fine Arts at the Slade School of Arts at the University of College London in 1999. Wong currently lives and works between Singapore and Berlin, having featured in numerous group exhibitions in both countries as well as in the United Kingdom. In 2008 alone, he was featured in solo exhibitions at Mkgalarie in Berlin, the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin and the Singapore Fringe Festival, Singapore. Ming Wong is an exhibitor at the 2009 Jakarta Biennale in Indonesia.

Exhibition documentation below.
https://www.datocms-assets.com/53320/1712731342-skmbt_c284e16052116260.pdf

https://www.datocms-assets.com/53320/1712731342-skmbt_c284e16052116260.pdf