Frye Art Museum Features LIFE OF IMITATION, 1/22-2/27

The compelling multimedia, moving-image installations of Berlin-based artist Ming Wong (b. 1971) have garnered increasing international recognition, from the Venice, Sydney and Gwangju Biennales to the Toronto International Film Festival. And now, the Frye Art Museum presents the first U.S. exhibition of the artist's work. With three of Wong's most important installations, Ming Wong: LIFE OF IMITATION is on view January 22 to February 27, 2011.

Wong's works explore the shifting nature of identity and belonging across cultures through performance and cinema.  As an artist based in Berlin, Wong has, until recently, primarily presented his work in Europe.  However, as Wong gains exposure in Asia and America, new readings of his work have emerged, such as his identity as an expatriate artist born in Singapore.  According to Wong, his complex interweaving of "poor imitation," melodrama, ethnicity, gender and language speak to an "outsider's view on the mechanism of managerial tactics as applied to nation building or identity politics."

Jointly organized by the Singapore Art Museum and the Frye Art Museum, Ming Wong: LIFE OF IMITATION, is guest curated by Tang Fu Kuen; the coordinating curator at the Frye is Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, the Frye Art Museum's director.

Included are three installations: In Love for the Mood, Life of Imitation and Four Malay Stories.

The first, In Love for the Mood, is an adaptation of Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love (2000), a meditation on love and infidelity set in the 1960s. In this "rehearsal of a rehearsal," a Caucasian actress plays both the leading man and woman and attempts to deliver his/her lines in Cantonese. These are recorded in three loops, played simultaneously on three screens.

Life of Imitation, Wong's tribute to Douglas Sirk's Hollywood melodrama Imitation of Life (1959), addresses issues of racial identity, gender, language and what the artist refers to as "in-between, bittersweet, where you don't know whether to laugh or cry." Sirk's leading characters, a black mother and her mixed-race daughter, who wants to be seen as white, are played by three male actors of different ethnicity.

Finally, Four Malay Stories reinterprets Malay showbiz icon P. Ramlee's most famous films, with Wong himself playing sixteen stock characters from a comedy (Labu and Labi, 1962); a melodrama (My Mother-in-Law, 1962); a film noir (Doctor Rushdi, 1971); and a historical epic (Semerah Padi, 1956).  As Wong explained in a recent interview, "Four Malay Stories represents a part of me that I had forgotten or lost... I come from Singapore, which is surrounded by the Malay archipelago, and that sets me off from mainland Chinese people or Chinese from other parts of the world. . . . You can't see the influence of Malay culture so clearly today. I wanted to bring it back out into the open."

The exhibition was originally commissioned by Singapore's National Arts Council for the Singapore Pavilion, at the 53rd Venice Biennale International Art Exhibition in 2009, where it was awarded a Special Mention by the jury.  The Singapore Art Museum presented the homecoming of Ming Wong: LIFE OF IMITATION in 2010.  In 2011, the exhibition is being presented in Seattle Washington before embarking on a world tour.

Ming Wong: LIFE OF IMITATION is co-organized by the Singapore Art Museum and the Frye Art Museum and funded by the Singapore Art Museum and the Frye Foundation with the generous support of Frye Art Museum members and donors. Media Sponsor for the exhibition is KUOW. Seasonal support is provided by ArtsFund.

Ming Wong: LIFE OF IMITATION is guest curated by Tang Fu Kuen. Coordinating Curator at the Frye Art Museum is Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker.
RELATED PROGRAMS:

PRESS PREVIEW
Ming Wong: LIFE OF IMITATION
Thursday, Jan. 20, 11 am
Preview with Frye Art Museum Director Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker and special guests artist Ming Wong and guest curator Tang Fu Kuen
Conversation
A Life of Imitation
Saturday, Jan. 22, 2 pm
Ming Wong, artist; Tang Fu Kuen, guest curator, and Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, director, Frye Art Museum
Wong, Tang, and Birnie Danzker discuss the artist's acclaimed adaptions of landmark films of world cinema as well as subsequent projects including Life & Death in Venice, a recent work created in Naples on Pasolini, and his new work on Pina Bausch. Presented in collaboration with the Singapore Art Museum.
Gallery Talk
Ming Wong: LIFE OF IMITATION
Thursday, Feb. 17, 6 pm
Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, director, Frye Art Museum
Join Frye Director Birnie Danzker for a gallery discussion of the work of Ming Wong and his  exploration of the shifting nature of identity and belonging across cultures.
Magic Lantern: Talks on Film an Art
Curated and hosted by film critic Robert Horton

In the Mood for Love (film screening)
Sunday, Jan. 23, 2 pm
Along with providing the inspiration for  Ming Wong's installation In Love for the Mood, Wong Kar-wai's lusciously beautiful film  In the Mood for Love (2000) charts a love story in early 1960s Hong Kong: a masterpiece of mutual attraction and restraint. (DVD projection; 98 min.)
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (film screening)
Sunday, Feb. 20, 2 pm
Just as Ming Wong adapts classic movies such as Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life, the gifted German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder paid his own  homage to a Sirk movie. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1973), Fassbinder's sharp-edged yet strangely tender version of Sirk's All That Heaven Allows, is a tale of a Munich widow who falls in love with a much younger Moroccan immigrant, a socially unacceptable transgression. (Bringing this full circle, Wong has also used Alias a basis for is work Angst Essen / Eat Fear (2008.)(DVD projection; 92 min.)