Why Filmmaker Ming Wong Is the Ultimate Shape-Shifter

In the hushed, reverent galleries of the National Gallery in London, saints usually suffer in silence. Not so in the hands of Ming Wong, who was given unparalleled access to the museum’s collection of European masterpieces during a residency last year. In his latest film Dance of the Sun on the Water | Saltatio Solis in Aqua, the Berlin-based, Singaporean artist reimagines Saint Sebastian, the third-century Roman centurion and Christian martyr who was shot through with arrows, as a slippery, time-traveling figure—queer, cinematic icon and shape-shifter—splintered across languages, bodies, and histories.

“Saint Sebastian is a time and space traveler, a marvelous vision of a human whose gender and age also seem to shift,” Wong told ARTnews during a recent interview. “We will all be Sebastians. We will all be, in turn, destroyers and martyrs.”

In Dance of the Sun on the Water, Asian performers of multiple genders speak Latin and move through the charged afterimage of Derek Jarman’s 1976 film Sebastiane, refracted through the National Gallery’s own painted Sebastians, of which there are 14. Often dressed in nothing more than a loincloth, the cast members are seen performing stylized re-enactments of Saint Sebastian’s martyrdom within the National Gallery’s ornate marble galleries. Against the backdrop of Renaissance and Baroque masterpieces, they dance, embrace, fight, and strike poses that mirror the bound, arrow-pierced figures found in the museum’s historical collection.

As with his shape-shifting Saint Sebastian, Wong has made a career out of destabilizing what seems fixed. Born in 1971, he characterized his native Singapore as a nation “slowly throwing off its colonial layers,” witnessing rapid urbanization, language policy changes, and the construction of a cultural infrastructure almost in real time. Coming from a family involved in medicine, he instead chose art at 15. “I defied expectations to follow,” he said. “I had always been good at art, and decided to pursue it seriously, as I was aware of the country’s plans to develop the art scene.”

Although an unfashionable choice in the 1990s, Wong studied traditional Chinese ink painting, calligraphy, and literature at Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in Singapore. “The reality of the foundational training turned out to be a lot of mind-numbing copying of the Masters,” he recalled. Yet that discipline “offered a window to a long-overlooked aspect of my cultural heritage.”

He sought release by writing English-language plays, which served as the basis of what would be his art practice. In that outlet, he found “gratification [in] playing with language in a postcolonial society,” he said. Cinema, too, would prove instructional. He consumed Hong Kong melodramas, Hollywood noirs, Bollywood musicals, and Singaporean variety shows. “As a young queer kid, it was a lot about identifying with characters of different cultural backgrounds, genders, body types, or nationalities,” he said. “Of course, this was all about desire and forming one’s identities.”

After moving to London to pursue a master’s degree at UCL’s Slade School of Fine Art, Wong began inserting himself into canonical Western films—by Douglas Sirk, Roman Polanski, or Pier Paolo Pasolini—playing every role himself, despite lacking formal acting training. In Life of Imitation, which debuted in the Singaporean Pavilion at the 2009 Venice Biennale and received a Special Mention from the Golden Lion jury, male actors from Singapore’s major ethnic groups cycled through Wong’s reworking of Sirk’s 1959 melodrama Imitation of Life, subverting race, gender, and identity.

“I study, copy, and reinterpret cinematic works of art by directors whose vision and accomplishments mean something to me,” he said. “I seek out ways of telling stories and test ways of reading, listening, looking, experiencing stories—ways that humans make meaning for themselves when they look at paintings or experience works of art.”

Miscasting is Wong’s signature device. In Angst Essen / Eat Fear (2008), he plays an elderly housekeeper who falls for a Moroccan migrant worker from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1974 romance Angst essen Seele auf, while in Next Year / L’Année Prochaine (2016), he takes on the male and female roles from Alain Resnais’s 1961 thriller Last Year in Marienbad. Like a chameleon, he easily can play the seducer and the seduced, depending on the project.

“Much of my work involves inserting myself into situations and contexts where I supposedly do not belong,” he explained, noting that for a future project he’s currently researching Cantonese opera’s trans-Pacific migrations from Hong Kong to North America, and its collision with Hollywood and early country music. “At the moment, I’m invested in what happens in the space between China and America.”

Wong doesn’t concern himself with creating something new or original, rather he aims to transfigure what we already know. “Over the years, I’ve come to understand how the notion of originality or authenticity has been reduced to just one node in an interlocking chain of cause and effect,” he said. “In a digital age, the hierarchies of master and copy or original and reproduction feel increasingly irrelevant. What I aim for now is a kind of variable collage of media—unstable, shifting, and always in flux.”

He described his process as relatively simple: “You observe, you think, you experiment, you question, you repeat.” But the results are formally complex: multi-channel videos, theatrical sets, karaoke lounges, mirrored stages. Drawing from Chinese opera, sci-fi cinema, propaganda film, and Cantopop, his installations often resemble prosceniums: frames within frames, collapsing inside and outside.

That reflexive layering comes to a head in his National Gallery installation. “My role is to keep questioning what we are looking at, and ways of looking,” Wong said. “Layers of meaning slip and slide across time and space. What you thought you knew so well can be fragile and destabilized.”

In Dance of the Sun on the Water, Latin becomes both sacred tongue and profane script, Asian bodies inhabit European martyrdom, and Jarman’s homoerotic desert becomes an absurdist echo in a London museum. The 23-minute film culminates in a striking ritualistic sequence where each actor takes turns assuming the role of the martyr, being symbolically shot with arrows by fellow performers who also cycle through the roles of the archers.

In merging East and West, Wong sees Singapore and its history as playing an essential role to what he’s trying to achieve. “It could be an advantage to not be in the dominant sphere or mainstream, but to have a perspective from the margin or as an outsider,” he said, noting that as “a crossroads of major distinct cultural and migratory routes” where the “art of code-switching” is a part of daily life, Singapore can be an instructive model.

In many ways, that is similar to what Wong sees as his role as an artist. “More than ever before, society needs artists and artistic thinking,” he said, “to question the world at large, provoke thought, reflection, and discussion, and discover means of communication beyond words. Artists can defy logic and reasoning, and dare to go into the unknown and the unexplored.”