Congrats! Am thrilled for you!

Now, are you going to fly me to Venice?? :D

- Simon

ming wong

please check this out: http://video-battle.net

- Simon

Thanks for stopping by and for the insightful comment that constitutes a post for ARTERI in itself. You are good value for money, my friend! Do contribute a few entries if you’re at all inclined! You know where I and Simon live.

I remember being shown Four Malay Stories for the first time in the home-studio of Khairuddin Hori. I loved it like crazy. The comic timing of the broken Malay and repeated takes was perfect.

If this was shown in Malaysia, I wonder what the reaction would be.

Four Malay Stories was being exhibited in the entrance gallery. Upstairs, were two wall projections of key scenes from Fassbinder films, titled Angst Essen/Eat Fear and Learn German with Petra Von Kant.

As soon as I walked in and watched Ibu Mertuaku, I could not stop laughing. Wong’s aping of foreign languages, Malay and German, verges on the ham but his earnestness keeps pulling us away from this conclusion. I use the word ‘aping’ because he mouths the words without the correct inflections, so it’s quite humourous.

The idea of aping a culture appealed to me most, because most of the time we talk about cultures being consumed, but all of us in turn inhabit the cultures we consume. We reenact as Wong does; we replay, mimic and simulate in our daily lives.

Interestingly, this exhibition was tied in with the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras; at first, I couldn’t think for what reason except that Wong cross-dresses in the videos. Haha. But the videos are about trying to get a grip on what we don’t quite understand. For sure, the subject matter of the videos, such as Ibu Mertuaku and Eat Fear (a cross-cultural love story) deal with fear, ignorance and misunderstanding.

Wong allows a makeshift quality to his productions. For example, baldcap lines are comically apparent, and a mannequin stands in during a make-out scene. In his Fassbinder video where two characters dance on the screen, he uses human beings as stand-ins in a very novel way! And when he plays a German woman, he bulks up his body, filling it out into a hefty fraü frame.

But where the videos lack production polish, Wong fills it out with his unique performance. This ‘bare bones’ simulation, involving only key props, is like how our memory functions, picking out only the essential bits, and sometimes even the random bits seem essential. It’s like how we build our understanding, well, of anything, really.