Rooms of Our Own: Watermelon Sisters [Yu Cheng-Ta + Ming Wong], Ming Wong, Zhi Wei, BuBu de la Madeleine
"Rooms of our own" refers to more than a physical space or site, it hopes to examine strategies that artists have deployed to resist homogenization. Through various mediums including painting, photography, installation, and video, these artists shatter the constraints that are imposed on creativity and taste. They exaggerate, role-play and parody to expose the ‘artificialness’ of stereotypes, and to resist simple binary thinking. With a certain ingenuity, they playfully carve out inclusive spaces and rooms of their own. Where all are embraced, and where all are irresistibly drawn to their aesthetics, and strength.
Watermelon Sisters is a performance art duo formed by Yu Cheng-Ta (b. 1983, Taiwan, China) and Ming Wong (b. 1971, Singapore) in 2017. They are a pair of fairy sisters, carrying out the mission of spreading love to those who struggle with boundaries and categories created by mankind. Roppongi Video Diary (2025) documents a performance by the Watermelon Sisters at the Roppongi Art Night, Tokyo in 2024. Clad in vibrant kimonos and carrying traditional umbrellas, the duo roamed the streets of Roppongi with exaggerated Japanese-style stage makeup and performed a vintage J-pop song.
Role-playing manifests in Ming Wong's photographic series Susan Wongtag Berlin Diary (2025). The persona "Susan Wongtag" draws inspiration from American writer, cultural theorist, and filmmaker Susan Sontag. Set within a library, the bookshelves, coffee cups, and monochromatic imagery evoke our imagination of Sontag's iconic appearance. Wong, whose cultural background and gender identity are remarkably different from Sontag, evolves into an intelligent and sophisticated Sontag. Their dispositions show strength, and an unwavering persistence. Sontag lived a life unafraid of criticism, and was unashamed in creating new 'rooms' and spaces for alternative thought and interpretations.
With a gentle yet audacious aesthetic, Zhi Wei (b. 1997, Beijing, China) utilizes the image of the orchid mantis in Autograph (2025) and Bon Appétit (2025). They are in realized in stark contrast to one another—one bright and one dark. In Autograph, an orchid mantis has evolved to mimic an orchid's appearance through an evolutionary biological process known as mimicry—an evolved resemblance of an organism with another object or being. The evolved Ms. Mantis rests easily with closed eyes amidst layers of gauze, lace, and gingham and jacquard fabrics. At the bottom-half of the painting, Madonna's signature is rendered with rhinestone-style buttons in an autograph format. The glamorous Ms. Mantis emerges as a starlet. In Bon Appétit, a glistening plate lays atop a gingham patterned fabric. The silhouettes of two mantises have come together to form a coincidental heart shape. Translucent lace fabric and gauze provide glimpses of events that may have occurred. We are looking at the aftermath of a post-mating scene. The female mantis consumes the male immediately after mating, and an empty plate remains. Rendered solely in monochrome, the work is a stylistic homage to black-and-white silent films. The deliberate symmetry also serves as an oblique reference to Art Deco.
In the fantasy world constructed by BuBu de la Madeleine (b. 1961, Osaka, Japan), mermaids are reimagined as "gender wanderers", whose tail fins resemble plant structures, releasing pollen-like reproductive cells. When individual cells meet, "seeds of life" are conceived and born. In this exhibition, fabric sculptures that represent the tail fins of mermaids face each other, and spherical objects that are made of cotton, colored cloth and white gauze float among the works, symbolize pollen and seeds. BuBu's paintings manifest the same worldview. By stripping away the gender symbols of mermaids, she weakens the significance of gender roles and encourages viewers to re-examine the interdependencies and connections binding all life.
Ota Fine Arts Shanghai invites you to enter these "rooms" constructed by four (groups of) artists. Through the dialectical interplay of mimicry and deconstruction, and performance and reality, they continue to fascinate us with their ‘audacious’ approaches.
