Ming Wong

Born in Singapore in 1971 and currently based in Berlin, Ming Wong is an artist whose practice critically examines the politics of "performing" and "re‑enactment" through video, performance, and installation. He explores how cultural identity is constructed and represented.

Wong's work often begins by reassembling world cinema history and popular culture — not to indulge nostalgia through mimicry, but to reveal how performative "selves," shaped by originality, legitimacy, gender normativity, and national identity, are socially constructed and consumed. In his signature works, he uses his own body to perform cinematic roles, deliberately shifting language, gender, and ethnicity to question the nature of performance and the cultural representations it perpetuates.

Later, his interests expanded into the intersection of Asian theatrical traditions and speculative imagination. In particular, he engages with traditional forms like Beijing Opera and Cantonese opera, interwoven with sci‑fi aesthetics.
One notable installation is Wayang Spaceship (2022), which envisions a mobile Cantonese Opera stage in Singapore as a spaceship. This large‑scale installation uses SF visual rhetoric to explore post-colonial state formation and immigrant cultures. The "wayang" here serves both as a theatrical stage and as a metaphor for social performance. By mixing archival Cantonese‑Opera footage, sci‑fi cinema, and snippets from Wong's own video works, the piece creates a visual space that transcends time, place, and gender, offering a poetic and critical reflection on Singapore's multicultural identity.

A recurring theme across Wong's body of work is what might be called "retrofuturism" — a cross-temporal layering that fuses traditional Eastern elements with gender-bending and cross‑dressing performance.
In his photo‑based series like Astro Girl (2015) and video work Windows on the World (Part 1) (2014), Wong portrays himself as an astronaut wandering through a spaceship set, performing an aria from Cantonese Opera. This is not mere aesthetic experiment; it connects the myth of 1960s - 70s Asian "progress" with contemporary disruptions of gender and cultural boundaries.

In his latest photographic collage prints, he combines found photographs of Wayang actors from Singapore and Malaysia from the 1950s-70s, illustrations of Soviet space exploration and science fiction from the same period sourced from Ukrainian booksellers, Chinese ink painting and dichroic films that change colour at different angles. These pieces overlay different historical and geographic layers to present a "multi-focal vision" that unites past and future perspectives.

Wong's practice is always an act of cultural translation and slippage; it serves as a mechanism for audiences to relativize the act of seeing itself. His world — where different times, cultures, and genders intersect — offers rich insights into expressions of complex identities in our global age.

Biography
1971 – Born in Singapore
1995 – BFA, Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Singapore
1999 – MA, Slade School of Fine Art, University of London
Based in Berlin

Selected Solo Exhibitions
Disgraced Lady Room, ASAKUSA, Tokyo (2019)
The Me Inside Me, Shiseido Gallery, Tokyo (2013)
A Life of Imitation, Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2011); Singapore Art Museum (2010); Singapore Pavilion, 53rd Venice Biennale (2009)

Selected Group Exhibitions
Signals: How Video Transformed the World, MoMA, New York (2023)
Global(e) Resistance, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2020)
Sunshower, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum / Mori Art Museum / National Art Center, Tokyo (2017)
Fassbinder – NOW, Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin (2015)
The Berlin Decade, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (2011)

Collections
Singapore Art Museum
MoMA, New York
M+, Hong Kong
Centre Pompidou, Paris
Tate Modern, London